


lady lazarus

by arbitrarily



Category: American Gods (TV)
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Porn with (Developing) Feelings, Temporary Character Death, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-01-16 06:09:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18515488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: "Dying worked for me. Everyone should try it at least once."Laura dies. And then she dies again. And again. And again. And again.





	lady lazarus

**Author's Note:**

> It's the _Russian Doll_ / _Happy Death Day_ / _Edge of Tomorrow_ AU that no one asked for! 
> 
> While I have read the book, it was roughly a million years ago and my memory is full of holes, so this fic is based solely on the TV canon. Events of the fic deviate from canon following Laura's death, and then hop on the time loop merry-go-round with actual canon events sprinkled throughout the narrative. 
> 
> Additional content warnings!: Ritual-esque sex and the dubious consensual nature of it; a whole lot of (temporary) deaths in varying degrees of graphic detail, including consensual murder (is that a thing?) and suicide; suicidal thoughts and implied/referenced depression; and a general blanket warning for Mad Sweeney and Laura Moon being Mad Sweeney and Laura Moon.

 

 

 

It's easy enough to do it and stay put.  
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day  
To the same place, the same face, the same brute  
Amused shout:

'A miracle!'  
That knocks me out.

**OLD MEDIA** | "Lady Lazarus," Sylvia Plath

 

 

"[Surprise, bitch. I bet you thought you'd seen the last of me.](https://tenor.com/wn1N.gif)"

**NEW MEDIA** |  _American Horror Story: Coven_

 

 

 

 

The first time Laura dies she is surprised by how little of a relief it is. She had assumed she would like death better. Instead, it’s just another thing that happens to her. 

She meets her death as best Laura Moon can do anything, including dying: with great apathy. Her body is flung from the car, boneless and limp already, Robbie’s dick caught behind her teeth like an uncooked Vienna sausage. There is absolutely no dignity to be found in death. She can’t move; every part of her feels broken and wrong. She takes a final breath in and her last thought is, _whatever_. 

Laura Moon is twenty-seven years old when she dies on the side of the road in Eagle Point, Indiana. She was born in Eagle Point and she spent the entirety of what constituted a life in Eagle Point and her body will be buried in Eagle Point, too. 

And like most things in life for Laura Moon, it does not stick.

 

 

 

 

**1**

 

Laura opens her eyes. 

She reaches for the clock radio to turn it off, but it’s already quiet, the plastic cool in her hand. She returns it to the nightstand and flops down on her back. 

“That was fucking weird,” she says to the ceiling. The bad dream is already fading to the back of her mind. Almost. Mostly. There’s a flat metallic taste in her mouth that makes her wonder if she needs to switch mouthwash brands.

She reaches blindly until her fingers brush her phone. She presses the home button and the screen lights up. She stares at the date then drops the phone in bed with her. 

Shadow will be home in five days. 

She gets up. A horrible feeling of deja vu dogs her steps, like someone had choreographed each move for her and now she is just marking time. It follows her into the bathroom as she brushes her teeth, into the shower, into the kitchen as she fills the coffeemaker. It’s like an itch she can’t quite reach to scratch. It’s like, she thinks with a dull and curious dread, all of this already happened before. She dismisses the thought. She’s good at that—dismissing things. She goes to get dressed. She eyes a striped t-shirt with a particular unearned disdain before she chooses to throw on a plain white t-shirt instead.

It’s when Robbie shows up at her front door that the bottom drops out. Just looking at him turns something over deep in her gut. 

“No.” It’s all she says in greeting. She’s done. This part, at least, feels new to her.

“What? No bon voyage fuck? The clock’s ticking down, babe.”

“You’re not shipping out.”

“No. But I am. We both are. Metaphorically speaking. Unless…” he trails off.

“Yeah, no. Goodbye. This is me saying goodbye.” Laura tries to push the door shut. Robbie lunges forward and jams his foot in the way. 

“Wait, Laura, no, I love you.” He says it all in one stupid rushed breath. When that doesn’t get a reaction out of her, he switches his role just as quickly. His face drops into an impotent glower. God, she never should’ve fucked him. He’s not even interesting. “I could tell Audrey.” 

Laura acts without thinking. She shoves at his shoulder, intending little more than to vent her anger and maybe make him take a step back, away and out of the door so she can close it. He’s a big enough guy, not Shadow big (but no one is), and yet somehow the push knocks him down the stairs outside her front door. Hard. He takes a wheezing breath from the ground and says something that sounds both like “What the fuck?” and a cat’s injured yowl. 

Laura frowns. Robbie struggles to get up to his hands and knees. She looks down at her hand like maybe she got herself a Terminator arm overnight or something. It’s still her hand. Ragged cuticles and chipped nails down to the nubs. Her wedding ring. 

“Jesus Christ. You been hitting the gym?” she thinks she hears Robbie say, but she’s not listening. She’s seeing what she saw the night before, if it was the night before. The dream she has called a dream all day. The car. He was driving. _I pulled into Nazareth, just a feelin’ ‘bout a half past dead_. The fly of his jeans under her hand. Her open mouth—

_Crash_. 

“You need to leave. Right now. Don’t ever come back here. Good-bye, Robbie.”

 

 

It was a premonition, she’s sure of it. She has rationalized and reordered every bit of information she has or remembers and what she has assembled is this: a fortune teller’s faith in her own wares. If she got into that car with Robbie, if she let him stay, if she fucked him one last time, later today she would be dead. 

She dodged a bullet. It sets her teeth on edge. It’s nonsense.

She startles when her phone rings. She answers it. “I’ll accept,” she says, and then—Shadow. 

“I love you. Something feels weird,” he says.

“I love you, too,” she says, distracted. Both here and not. She’s been here before; it’s fucking nonsense.

“Everything’s okay there, right?” he says and she freezes. She looks down at her hand again, the hand that all but threw Robbie across the yard. She licks at her teeth like she can still taste metal. 

“Puppy, I think something’s wrong,” she finally says, her voice small as it sticks in her mouth.

Shadow says something in reply. His voice is very faraway. There is static between them. If she wants to get metaphorical and pseudo-deep, she’d say that there has always been static between them, even at their closest. Shadow’s voice fades and she clutches the phone that much tighter in her hand. She can smell asphalt and blood and she thinks she knows what it feels like to die. She thinks she knows more than any person has any right to if they’re expected to keep on living.

“Shadow?” she says, but he is already gone.

 

 

She slams on the brake, but it’s already too late. She has already yanked the steering wheel too hard to the right. The impact jars her as the car careens into the guardrail and she feels her seatbelt first bite into her neck and then snap. 

In the middle of the road, a cat blinks. It resumes its journey across the street to the other side.

Not a-fucking-gain, Laura thinks, the thought drowned out by the noisy, ear-splitting screech of metal on metal. Her body hurts as it’s tossed, as the car flips and flips again. This happened before. She’s sure of it. It was no dream; it really happened. She died before. She’s fucking dead. There is a hollow ache in her head as it slams against the passenger-side door and then bounces off. 

And then, nothing. 

As the car settles, Laura's body hangs out of the shattered passenger window. Her arm is crushed alongside her ribs. Her breath rises and falls, shallower and shallower; small wheezing pants escape from her mouth and she can smell the coppery tang of blood and heat and burning metal. She spies a flutter of movement in the distance, descending the steep embankment. She can’t move her neck. A man, she thinks. He’s approaching. He blots out what view she had of the world she is swiftly departing. He looks huge from this angle, or maybe he is always huge. She tries to blink but her head feels wrong. She can’t recognize him. He’s already fading. But then, so is she.

This is taking too long; this is Laura Moon’s second-to-last thought the second time she dies. At least there isn’t a dick in my mouth. This is her final thought.

 

 

 

 

**2**

 

_Beep. Beep. Beep._

A gasp sticks in the back of her throat as she jerks awake. 

She realizes just as quickly two things: her neck isn’t broken and she didn’t need to gasp. She doesn’t even need to inhale. She presses her hand flat to her chest. Nothing. 

It’s quiet. Incredibly quiet. Sure, there are the usual morning noises from the neighborhood outside her window, but. It’s quiet. She rests her hand on her chest. All she finds is emptiness. A silence, total in its stillness. She tries to take in another breath and is met only with the uselessness of it; there’s nowhere inside of her for it to go. She’s losing her fucking mind. 

She rushes into the bathroom, her legs jerky and just shy of outside her control. Her knees don’t want to bend. She’s so stiff. She digs through the medicine cabinet until she finds what she’s looking for—a cheap drugstore thermometer. She sticks it in her mouth. 78.5°. She drops the thermometer into the basin of the sink like it bit her. She leans forward suddenly, the lip of the sink biting into her stomach and she holds her mouth open in front of the mirror. No fog. Nothing. She’s not breathing.

“Holy shit, I’m fucking dead,” she says. 

She does what she always does when she is presented with something she can’t understand. She ignores it. When that doesn’t work, she does the second best thing. She picks up the phone and she calls Audrey. 

Audrey answers on the fourth ring. Before she can say anything, Laura says, “Are you dead?”

“What? No.” Audrey pauses. “Are you dead?” She’s using that goofy joking tone she only ever uses in socially awkward or uncertain settings or when she can’t remember why she’s friends with Laura in the first place. 

“These things don’t happen to normal people,” Laura says in her steeliest voice. She’s negotiating, and she is well aware Audrey is the wrong person for it. An idea occurs to Laura and she switches tracks. “Wait. Is everyone dead? Are we all dead? Do you think everyone is dead now?” Maybe this whole thing isn’t personal. Maybe it’s a glitch in the matrix or whatever. The whole world is dead and it has nothing to do with Laura Moon. For some reason, Laura finds herself hunched down behind the kitchen counter, as if someone might be spying on her. 

“Laura, what the fuck, it’s not even eight o’clock. Are you drunk?” She’s not drunk, but she’s definitely dead. She doesn’t know how to explain that to a living person. What being dead is like. Twice-dead. She's a twice-baked potato. She claps her hand over her mouth before she starts laughing hysterically.

“Just kidding. April Fool’s.”

“It’s not April, and that’s not funny. Hold on,” Audrey yawns, “I think Robbie wants to talk to you.”

“Tell him I can’t, I’m dead.” She hangs up quickly. She stares down at the phone in her hand. It starts to buzz, Audrey’s name lighting up the screen. She ignores it. She pulls up the internet instead, searches her name and Eagle Point, Indiana. A high school graduation announcement, and that’s fucking it. So much for the well-lived, well-documented life. No obituary. No police report. But then, there wouldn’t be. It hasn’t happened yet. 

Laura heads to the door leading out to the garage and throws it open quickly. Her car is sitting there, waiting, the only dings and scratches on it the ones she’s earned over the last several years of ownership. 

“What the fuck.”

She closes the door. She goes into the kitchen. She doesn’t have anyone else to call. Who do you call when you think you’re already dead? When no one else seems to realize what happened the day before? Today? Today already happened. Twice, by her count. Jesus Christ, she’s died twice. 

She sits down at her kitchen table and she thinks you could call what she’s doing waiting. She holds her hand over her chest and still—nothing. Maybe she’s a vampire. But, no. That can’t be it. She has a reflection. She doesn’t have fangs. She’s not hungry at all, let alone for blood. She thinks she’s still fond enough of garlic. She’s just dead. Dead dead dead.

God, she wishes she was, like, seriously dead. Not whatever this shit is. 

She spends the day wandering the house as she has always done, wasting her time. She stares at the television but she doesn’t turn it on. She’s preoccupied enough by herself that she doesn’t even notice Shadow doesn’t call. Her hand keeps wandering to her chest to feel for the lack of movement. 

Being dead hasn’t done all that much to interrupt her normal daily routine. And it’s in the spirit of that, and for lack of anything else to do, that she goes to work.

 

 

This is fine, she tells herself. Her tie is crooked and her face is sallow, pale, as she reports to the blackjack table. Her hands are calm and still as they handle the cards. 

Laura glances up, across the room. Her eyes fix on a tall ginger with a busted face and a mean-looking mouth lounging all legs over at the Texas hold ’em table. By the looks of it, he’s losing. Bad. He’s raising hell in answer to his own bad luck, the sound of his voice carrying to her. As if he can feel her eyes on him, he stops mid-rant and looks straight at her. Their eyes meet. Recognition is open and obvious on his face. She feels something eerily similar and it’s like someone just passed over her grave. She falters with the cards.

Before she can pick the cards back up, an arm grabs her roughly by the waist and hauls her back against an unyielding body. “What—” she starts, only to be interrupted.

“This is a robbery!” the body holding her yells. She can feel the barrel of a gun pressed against the side of her head. She wonders what happens when you kill an already dead body. Is it zombie rules? Is she really going to be dead-dead if he offs her with a headshot? She’s more curious now than she thinks she has ever been. Fear is just an idea someone passed down to her secondhand. She lets her body go slack against the world’s dumbest armed robber—Anubis Casino, of all fucking places—and her face slips into something placid and accepting of her obvious fate. 

The guy at the Texas hold ‘em table is still watching her. Everyone else has scattered, yelling, knocking over tables, chips flying. He hasn’t moved. His eyes are narrowed not in concern but as if he is working an equation out in his head, sure of the outcome but confused as to how he got there. 

When the gun finally does fire, deafeningly loud behind her ear, the last thing she sees is how very unsurprised he is.

 

 

 

 

**3**

 

She wakes. In bed, at home. Again.

At this point, that’s hardly unexpected. The unexpected is that she finds this time she has somewhat of a pulse and she can breathe. Sort of. She came back, again, but different from the last time. She doesn’t get the rules of any of this. She doesn’t get why this is happening to her. Everything about her feels hungover, sluggish and off. It’s kind of like the way she always imagined it would feel if she had the misfortune to be dosed with chloroform. That used to be something the very much so alive Laura Moon would fantasize about: chloroform. A rag soaked in it, a mystery hand that slapped it right over her mouth, lights out.

“Fuck it,” she says.

She gets out of bed and she gets the bug spray. Her movements are purposeful, quick and twitchy.

She goes out to the hot tub. 

 

 

 

 

**6**

 

Shadow doesn’t call her anymore. Not since the first time she came back.

Laura decides to call the prison herself. She waits on hold; she wonders how she’ll die this time. Because that’s the thing: she keeps dying. Two car crashes, a hostage situation gone awry, self-induced bug spray-administered asphyxiation, a broken neck at the bottom of a flight of stairs, and an utterly inelegant bathroom slip and fall. 

“Ma’am?” she hears the voice on the other of the phone say. The voice tells her there is no inmate in custody by the name of Shadow Moon. 

“That’s impossible. He was there yesterday.”

 

 

 

 

**8**

 

Laura doesn’t bother going in to work anymore. 

She doesn’t see a point. To be fair, she didn’t see a point when she was alive either, but she’s going to chalk this clarified nihilism up to the one maybe good thing death has given her. Death has taken more than it has given, including, obviously, her life, but also her patience and her nerves. It is incredibly exhausting to wait for death to come crashing back into you, as if each time Laura wakes it is merely a temporary respite from what and where she is destined to be: dead and in the ground. 

Laura may not go to work anymore, but work comes home to her. 

That evening, a solid twelve hours into this iteration of purgatory or whatever, she finds the guy from the Texas hold ‘em table all but banging down her front door.

Laura throws the door open. She tips her head back to look the guy in the eye, his hand still raised in a fist, mid-knock. 

“Hey, do I know you?” It takes her a beat, the words out of her mouth even as she starts to piece him together. He looks as pissed as she remembered him from the casino. As drunk, too. He puts his hand down but he towers that much taller over her. He steps over the threshold and she takes a step back. He slams the door hard enough to make it jolt on its hinges.

“You got my coin, and I've come to collect.” She frowns in confusion. This guy speaks with a tempered Irish accent that seems to swell with his rage, and Laura already knows opening the door was a bad, bad, super bad decision.

“I have your _what_?”

“My coin, cunt. Give it.”

Her eyebrows raise. “Wow, okay. First of all? You’re not talking to me like that. Not in my house, not ever. Second? Do I look like a vending machine? I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“You’ve got my lucky coin, that’s what I’m talking about.”

“Your lucky coin?” This just gets better and better. “You must have me confused with some other poor asshole who robbed a magic shop because last I checked? I don’t have any luck and I certainly don’t have any coins laying around here.”

His eyes narrow as he looks down at her. “You’ve really got no idea, do you?”

“Uh, first of all, who the fuck are you?”

“Mad Sweeney. Can’t say I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Mad Sweeney—a name that doesn’t bode well for anything, if you ask her—steps towards her and she takes another step back. He crowds her until her back is literally up against the wall and he is looming over her. He points a finger towards her chest. 

“You lay hands on me, and you’re gonna regret it, ginger minge.”

His mouth twists into something wry and challenging. He taps her chest, right over where her heart is or should be, twice with his finger. Laura reacts fast. She breaks his finger, easily. 

He yells, pulls back from her and drops to his knees. “Fucking hell and all the bloody saints of Ireland.”

“I told you not to touch me.”

“Duly fucking noted.” He has his entire big body curled around his finger like a fucking baby. He manages to regain his composure enough to look back up at her. He cautiously points at her with his middle finger. 

“Where a fucking heart should be inside of you, Dead Wife? You got my coin.”

There’s a lot he just said that requires explanation, but— _Dead Wife_. She freezes. “What the fuck did you call me?”

“It surely wasn’t cunt, so I beg you to spare me the rest of my fingers.”

“How did you,” and she stops. None of this makes any sense. She latches onto the second word now. “How do you know Shadow?”

He shrugs and it’s not nearly as nonchalant as he thinks it is. “We both know a guy.”

She frowns. “Is this some kind of prison thing? Are you in a gang? A prison gang? Is coin some kinda euphemism?”

He pulls himself back up to standing. “Not last I checked, on all fronts.”

Her frown deepens. “How do you know him?”

“Like I said, we both know a guy. Both work for a guy, last I saw the two of them.”

She feels her face slacken and go soft. “You saw Shadow?”

“In the flesh.” 

“He’s in prison.”

“He is now, maybe. Or maybe not. When I saw him, you were dead, rest in peace and so on and so forth, and he got himself released early, good riddance instead of good behavior.” He eyes her as he gets to his feet and smirks. “None too pleased with you, I hate to say. ‘Died as she lived,’ he said, he did. ‘Sucking cock.’”

“He didn’t say that.”

“No, but he should’ve.”

“None of this makes any sense,” she says after a long pause.

“I lost a wager to that dear husband of yours and he made off with my property. Let’s start there.”

“Your coin,” she says, mocking quotation marks audible around the words.

“My fucking coin. My luck.”

“Your luck?” she snaps. She crosses her arms over her chest. “I’ve worked as a croupier at the Anubis Casino for longer than any human has any right to work at an establishment such as that, so believe me when I say, I can tell you a thing or two about all the shit your average dumbass such as yourself assigns a fairy tale like luck to. None of it means anything.”

“Luck’s no fairy tale, love.”

“Well it certainly isn’t real. And I certainly am not standing here in front of you powered by a gold fucking doubloon.”

“It’s no doubloon,” he says. And then he tells her what Shadow did. That when she died—“the first time, for clarity’s sake”—he’d come to the funeral. He’d stood at her grave and said his final fuck yous and farewells and then, for whatever noble, petty, irrational, sentimental reason, he dropped the coin onto her freshly dug and filled grave. And down it sank. Down and down and down it went until—

He is very close to her again. They both look down at her chest. “I’m not gonna touch you again,” he says very quietly.

“Good,” she says.

He rears back from her and paces to the other side of the room. “And then you woke up, didn’t you? Safe as houses, snug as a bug, ready to go careening down that same road to your waiting doom. And you’ve met it. Fuck, you’ve met it half a dozen times now, by my count.”

She blinks. “You—you too?”

“You die, we all go back to square one. The morning of, so to speak. I’ve woke in the same shit Econo Lodge over in Highbanks for over a week running now, and I gotta say, I was more than pleased to check out of that hellhole the day you burnt rubber.”

She throws her arms up in exasperation. “Who are you?”

“I told you. Mad Sweeney.”

There’s a low tide of dread gathering strength within her. Despite that, she still feels a fool when she asks, “What are you?”

“Knew you were a lot of things, darling, but I also knew you weren’t dumb.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I’m a leprechaun.”

Laura eyes him with a searingly obvious combination of doubt and disdain and premeditated murder. He’s easily well-over six feet tall and he’s built like a brawler with no compunction for violating the rules of a fair fight. She can smell the booze on him from here and he’s dressed like the missing and presumed dead member of some temporarily tragically hip throwback cover band. 

“Yeah?” she drawls. She folds her arms around her middle. “Come to escort me to the end of the rainbow? Get me my pot of gold?”

His face goes thunderous and he mutters a great deal under his breath that she doesn't catch.

“Speaking of pots of gold,” she says, “can’t you just, I don’t know, magic yourself up a new shiny coin and we can call it a day?”

“That’s not how it fucking works.”

“Oh, sure, because _that_ makes sense.”

“It does?”

“Of course it doesn’t!” She paces in a circle. She stops. “Where’s Shadow now?”

“With the man in charge, I should say.”

“And who the fuck might that be? The President? The Wizard of Oz? Jesus Christ?”

“None of the above.” He flops down onto her couch and kicks his feet up. She scowls. “Shadow’s man goes by many names. Odin. Grimnir. Mr. Wednesday. He's a god."

Laura's eyes widen in disbelief. "Like, capital-G God?"

Sweeney shrugs. "More like, one of many. And he’s got a job for your Shadow.” He glances over first at her and then past her. “And I guarantee you, Grimnir doesn’t want any distractions for your man.”

“Does Shadow think I’m dead? Like, right now? Does he think I’m dead?”

“I’m not a bloody mindreader.” He stretches, makes himself more comfortable. “But, maybe he doesn’t. There you stand. Heart pounding and breath filling your lungs and letting my coin keep you right side of the grave. Maybe he doesn’t think you’re dead. Not yet. But if you haven’t yet cottoned on—Dead Wife, you’re gonna die again.” Her body doesn’t always do any of these things, but he doesn’t need to know that. She is empty inside, save, apparently, for his coin.

“What? You’re going to kill me?”

Something dark passes over his face and she thinks maybe he just might. 

“Why don’t you just take it from me. Right now. Chest burster-style. Go ahead, stick your hand on in and see what you find. See what happens next.”

“I can only take it from the willing.”

“How refreshing for a girl to hear.” She gets up close to him, crouches down beside him. “I am never going to be willing.” She stands up to her full, admittedly meager, height and places her hands on her hips. “Looks like you and me, we’re at an impasse, asshole. Any suggestions?”

He sucks at his teeth and he looks at her like he’d relish the opportunity to be her next cause of death.

“I might know somebody. In Kentucky.”

“And this somebody? Can fix all this?”

“Fingers crossed.” He groans as he sits up. 

“Come on then.” She snaps her fingers. “Let’s get moving.” 

Laura takes the steps leading down into the garage in a hurry. The toe of her boot catches on the final step and her arms windmill out as she cants forward. She crashes into a rack of shelves along the wall but she manages to keep her balance.

“Yikes,” she says under her breath. That could’ve been bad. She glances over to where Sweeney fills the doorway leading back into the house.

“Oh shit,” he’s saying, and that’s when she looks up. A bowling ball she had no idea was even kept on the top shelf comes rolling down to meet her head. 

 

 

 

 

**9**

 

“Is Shadow in Kentucky?”

They’re in a bar, somewhere in southern Indiana. 

She woke in her bed earlier that morning with a pounding headache, only for that headache to be interrupted by a pounding at her front door. Sweeney again. She made him sit at her kitchen table and explain what he knew, which wasn’t much. Per him, only the two of them are aware of what’s happening; everyone else just goes on repeating this same day like it’s nothing. She envies them.

“I haven’t the fucking faintest where Shadow Moon has got himself.” She wonders if he’s lying, if that’s a thing he’d lie to her about. Or maybe he’s the kind of guy who lies for sport. She used to be someone who did that, lied just for the sake of lying. Maybe it’s a good thing she’s not dead _dead_ because she’s pretty sure there’s no way she was getting past the pearly gates. 

She leans in a little closer to him, trying to draw attention away from the bartender and back to her. Despite everything, and by everything she means Death and A Reputably Lucky Coin, this Mad Sweeney is the sort to take his sweet, sweet time. He doesn’t seem to get the hurry, moving at his own leisurely pace, which includes the prolonged pit stop at this shithole, the bar top itself most likely covered in a patina of spilled beer, saliva, and hepatitis. 

“Did you meet him in Kentucky?”

“Who? Shadow? What? No.” He pauses to throw back a shot. The glass rattles against the bar as he shoves it forward for more. “Place called the Crocodile Bar,” he says, like that should mean anything to her. 

She cranes her neck to look up at him. “Do you think maybe, just maybe, Shadow goes back there each time we,” she waves her had in an arc, because she’s still not entirely sure what to call what keeps happening to her. Sweeney frowns down at her. She’s going to get a cramp in her neck if she spends any more time with him, constantly tilting her head back just to look at him. Maybe the solution is to stop looking at him.

“He’s with Grimnir now, no way he’d have him retracing his steps.” He hisses as he downs his whiskey in one hungry gulp. “He leaves that to me.”

“Maybe we should go to this Crocodile Bar place,” she says. She aims for nonchalance but she can hear the earnestness that bleeds through.

“Nah, I don’t think we’re gonna do that.” He’s distracted now, his attention fixed on someone further down the bar. Someone just as big as Sweeney, bald-headed and face vacant of any emotion other than short-fused irritation.

That same sort of irritation, mixed with anger or tension or just Sweeney’s default foul mood, all but radiates off of him. He slams his glass down on the bar and calls down to him, “Oi! You there!”

And just like that, they’re fighting. Laura rolls her eyes. She tries to drink her vodka but she might as well not be—she can’t taste a fucking thing.

She watches the fight with disinterest. Sweeney invites violence, both to be delivered and upon his person. He grins, wide and manic, even as his face is broken open and raw, dark blood coursing down from his nose and mouth, staining his teeth. He laughs suddenly, dark and delighted, as he rears his arm back. His knuckles are shredded and red, and he pummels the other man’s face down and into the bar, shattering a collection of empty beer bottles. He is alive, she thinks, in a way she has never been. 

As if to punctuate that very thought, an errant shard of broken glass catches her in the throat. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

She reaches a hand up and can feel her own blood threatening to spill around the piece of glass. With a sigh, she pulls it out. Blood gushes down and coats the front of her shirt. She slumps over as the fight abruptly stops; a funerary hush falls over the gathered crowd, Laura’s imminent, albeit repeat, demise pulling focus. 

That is how she dies this time, his huge bleeding ginger face the last thing she sees. Alive, she thinks, is such a violent place to be.

 

 

 

 

**13**

 

They’re never going to make it at this rate.

Death finds her so much easier now, like she cheated what the universe had designed for her. 

This is the farthest they have made it: the border of Indiana leading into Kentucky. Each time prior, they were waylaid by her untimely death. The bar fight; another car crash; an inconvenient gas station explosion; Laura choking on a piece of beef jerky she made the mistake of trying at one of Sweeney’s many required rest stops (she had woken still feeling as if her ribs were cracked and broken, Sweeney’s arms huge and all-encompassing around her as she died mid-failed Heimlich maneuver).

When she makes mention of it to Sweeney, the WELCOME TO KENTUCKY sign growing in size as they approach it, he takes one hand off the wheel and points at her.

“That’s on account of you, Dead Wife.”

“How’s that now?”

“My coin keeping company with the maggots inside of you?”

“I don’t have any maggots,” she interrupts. At least she doesn’t think she does. She woke this time around feeling more alive than usual: heartbeat, breathing, blood under her skin when she experimentally cut her finger open. For science. To know. The blood was her own, dark red as it slid down the length of her finger.

Sweeney continues as if she hadn’t spoken. “Without my coin, my luck is fucked.”

“So don’t play the lotto for awhile,” she says.

“Nah, I mean it’s worse than all that. I become a regular casualty of Murphy’s Law. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong for old Mad Sweeney.”

“Shame,” she says.

He glances at her quickly before his attention turns back to the road stretching before them. 

“I appreciate the American, can-do, independent spirit you got there, but,” he shrugs. “We’re in this together, aren’t we? My luck is yours.”

Laura slouches lower in her seat. Of all the travel companions. An idea occurs to her. 

“What happens if you die?” she asks Sweeney. 

He snorts. A cigarette hangs out of his pursed mouth, threatening to ash onto his jacket. “I’d rather not find out.” He reaches and takes the cigarette from his mouth and exhales. “How I’d hate to be roadkill with my skirt flipped up over my ass.”

Laura’s skin prickles and she bats at the air-conditioning vent. Angles it towards him. She stays very quiet. Finally, she speaks.

“How did you know that?”

He jerks his head towards her. “What?”

“Watch the road,” she says.

“I am. What?”

“I was wearing a skirt, the first time.”

For once, he goes quiet. Something horribly wrong slowly begins to take shape in her mind. He interrupts it.

“Lucky guess,” he says. The shrug he offers her is purposeful and performative. “I do read the newspaper, you know. Lovely obituary. Laura Moon, dead at twenty-seven. I’d say they did a fine job of capturing your essence, but we both know there was never very much of that to go around.”

“Shut up.”

 

 

 

 

**21**

  
****

_This_ is the farthest they have made it: Kentucky, one hour outside of someone he calls Easter’s place. 

“We should just go there, tonight,” Laura says, again.  She’s insisted it since Sweeney pulled into the pot-holed filled parking lot of a strip mall bar. 

“And I said, the woman’s got manners. Don’t wanna be heading there on the wrong foot in the wrong pair of shoes.” He takes a giant bite of his burger and Laura watches in something that feels a lot like jealousy. Her appetite is gone, again. She’s thirsty, but nothing quenches her thirst. She’s tired, but she can’t get any rest. This whole dead-but-not-really-dead thing fucking sucks. 

She narrows her eyes at him. “You want to know what I think?”

“Can’t say I ever have.” He licks his fingers.

“I think you’re deliberately keeping me from Shadow. You’re working on this Wednesday guy’s orders, and he wants me as far away from Shadow as I can get. And you’re not doing a very good job of hiding it.”

He flashes her a bladed smile. “Death’s doing that for you, darling. I’m a mere passenger with a vested interest.”

“And, what? I deserve what I’m getting?”

“Didn’t say that, did I? Though maybe you did. Couldn’t keep your legs or your mouth shut, could you.”

“Call me a slut and I’ll show you what that coin of yours can really let me to do to you. I think we both know you wouldn’t like that.” She eyes him up and down. “Then again, maybe you would. Sick fuck.”

He lifts an eyebrow. “No. What I had a mind to say was you seemed to have no problem at all opening the Moon marital bed to new applicants while poor old dear sweet Shadow moldered away in the United States criminal justice system for a crime of your design."  


“Is there a question somewhere in there?”

“What the fuck were you thinking?”

She doesn’t even know how to begin to explain herself to him. She’s furious with him for making her feel like she does have to explain herself. Who the fuck does he think he is? Well, she knows who he thinks he is, but that’s a whole other thing.

“My cat died,” she finally says.

 

 

They set out the following morning, Laura behind the wheel and Sweeney barking out belated directions from beneath his hangover. 

“You better look alive if we’re almost there,” she says, swatting at his thigh.

“Funny, thought that was what we were doing for your decomposing ass.” He sits up though, with a grunt, and tries to wipe the bleariness from his eyes. 

He groans. “I used to be a king, y’know.”

The double take she gives him would be comical if anything and everything about this was different and she wasn’t dead.

He’s crazy, she’s certain of that now.

“That before or after the pot of gold.”

“Har, har, you’re very funny, you are, Dead Wife. No respect.” He’s too big for the passenger seat and his legs are folded up uncomfortably. Good. “I was a king, a bird. A warrior. A saint, a troll, a fairy. Pretty lass brought me here and here I’ve stayed. Watched my fortune dwindle before me to this, a fucking servant in all but name, charioting death hungry girls about, unable to even get my hands on what’s rightfully mine.”

She doesn’t have anything to say to any of that, assuming she understood a bit of it.

“That’s a lot to fit on a resume,” she finally says, drolly. 

“I’m owed a battle,” he says, as if he didn’t hear her. He’s staring out towards the sun, lifting up above the tree line, like maybe that’s where his battle waits.

“Yeah? And what happens then?”

“I meet my destiny.” Great, she thinks. A suicidal, delusional self-described leprechaun. 

She frowns. “I don’t get it.”

“Grimnir owes me a battle.” He lapses into silence. “Pull over here. We’re almost there, and I don’t trust your dead eyes behind the wheel.”

 

 

Easter opens the door in a flutter of pastel taffeta and a bright blonde hair. “Begging your pardon, but I am not entertaining today, and such, will not be receiving guests. She looks Laura up and down. “Least of all dead girls,” she says. 

“It’s a favor, I ask, and a brief one at that,” Sweeney says. “On my behalf.”

“Mad, Mad Sweeney.” She folds her arms. “I’m allowing entrance, against my better judgment, in the name of curiosity and settled debts, and very little else.” She stands up straight and claps her hands. “Come in, come in!”

She leads them into a salon, a large round table with a pale pink tablecloth overwhelmed by an oversized floral arrangement at the center. Easter rings a bell and a trio of cater waiter-looking dudes enter and begin to pour the tea and set out impossibly tiny finger sandwiches.

Laura tries to take a sip of the tea but it tastes like ash. “Yuck,” she says. 

“You have’t house-trained this one, Sweeney?” Easter says.

He shrugs. “Her manners were far from polite in life. The more she slips off the bone, the worst she gets.”

“I am not slipping off the bone, thank you very much.” Laura sits up primly. “And my manners are fine.”

“Barring bad manners, what brings the two of you to my doorstep at this very early hour?”

Sweeney points at her. “She’s dead, and she won’t stop dying.”

“Oh, that is interesting,” Easter says. “How many times?”

“A lot,” Laura says. “Like, a lot a lot.”

“Hmm. So resurrection won’t stick.” She smacks the flat of her hand against the table. “Come here. Let me take a look at you.”

Laura goes to her. Easter grabs her by the forearms and holds her steady. She stares into her eyes and Laura wants nothing more than to pull away from her.

“Well. Well!” She pats Laura’s hand and then pulls it back in disgust. “Have a seat then.”

“Can you help me?”

“I think I’d rather you were seated for this part.” She watches Sweeney and not Laura as Laura sits back down, a darkly curious expression creasing her face. 

Laura sits down slowly, already braced for what she doesn’t want to hear. These gods are fucking useless. No wonder no one wants to worship them. 

“This one,” Easter says and jerks her head in Sweeney’s direction,” he’s already gone and stuck his thumb in the pie.”

“What pie?”

“You’re pie,” Sweeney says, very quietly. She thinks she’s known him long enough to classify this as uncharacteristic.

“My pie?” She turns back to Easter. “I don’t have any pie.” Easter grins.

“No, corpse bride,” Sweeney snaps. “You are the pie. The pie is you.”

“Precisely,” Easter says. “And the pie is his responsibility now.”

“I’m sorry, what the fuck?”

“This country, you see, it’s a place that is run on the balance of things. Light and dark and good and evil. Life and death. Compromise, it’s the driving engine everything here was founded on.”

“Okay, so?”

“The death he took and the life he brought out of the grave—that’s his luck responsible for that. It’s the will of a god, and I cannot, nor will not, interfere. It’s outside my scope, you understand. But, the restoration of your life, taken by a god, has left a debt. Needs paying, like most debts.”

“‘The death he took?’ I,” and Laura stops. Across the table from her Sweeney is sitting very tall and very stiff. “You fucking piece of shit. You killed me.”

“Oh, she didn’t know. How impolite of me, telling tales out of school and at the table nonetheless.” Easter gets to her feet. “I’m afraid I must ask you both to leave. I abhor violence within my household, and I truly do not have the stomach for conflict, not on a lovely afternoon like today. You’ll see yourselves out?”

 

 

Laura stalks down the drive and out past the gate to the side of the road where they parked the car. “Why are you following me?” she shouts over her shoulder.

“You’re my fucking ride. And you still have my coin!” 

Laura yanks the driver side door open hard enough to make the metal whine on its hinges. “That is really the least of your problems right now.”

“Alright then.” Sweeney holds his arms open as he stands on the other side of the car. “Have at it. What do you want to know?”

Her response is a swift jab right into his gut. Knocks the wind out of him and he goes down on his knees. 

She doesn’t stop, and he takes it. He goes down heavy and pliant like he knows this is something he deserves. It only makes her want to hit him harder. She kicks his shoulder and he rolls onto his back. Her rage feels like a living thing, nested and hot, safe, inside of her. She lunges forward and all but crushes his balls under her boot. She kicks him in the ribs instead. Listens as his breathing goes weak and shallow, Sweeney curled up on the graveled shoulder of the road.

“All this time,” she says, breathless herself. “You killed me, and then you have the fucking audacity to act like I owe you something? Fuck you. Fuck. You.”

“Wednesday, it was Wednesday. I was acting on his orders.”

“Listen to that—he sings.” She takes a step back from him, suddenly completely and utterly tired. “So that makes you his errand boy.”

“Yes,” he spits out, full of venom and self-loathing and blood from his split lip.

“Just his poor little whipping boy sent out to do his bidding. Oh boo-hoo, you couldn’t say no. You had orders.” Her voice goes hard. “You should ask those assholes at Nuremberg how that defense worked out.”

He’s angry now, too. “You’ve never owed anyone anything in your pathetic excuse for a sorry fucking life, so don’t go speaking at me as if you know a fucking thing I am talking about. I have a debt, and I have paid and I have paid and I have paid, and it never fucking ends. You? You were just another piece of collateral. You were never supposed to matter. I was never meant to see you again.”

Laura takes a long step back from him, into the road.

“I never want to see you again,” she says.

“I want my fucking coin back first.”

“Consider it a price of doing business.” She takes another step. “My life for your coin.”

Sweeney’s eyes widen and he struggles to sit up. “Get outta the fucking road, won’t you.”

“You don’t get to fucking tell me what to do.” She takes a bigger step backwards from him.

He rubs at his face, still sprawled in the gravel. “For the love of god and the bloody fucking pantheon of gods, get out of the road, woman.”

“Oh, so now he wants to save my life.”

His heels skid in the gravel as he sits up straighter. “You think you’re the only one enduring a punishment here? There is only one other person in this fucking country who is knowingly going through what you’re going through, and that person is me.”

“Cry me a river, you fucking baby.” She takes a wider step out into the road, her feet lined up with the faded double yellow lines down the center. “Maybe I should see if I can get somebody to hit me. Why the fuck not. I can start over again, the comfort of my own bed, and strike out on my own. Without you.”

“Like fuck you’re wandering off with my coin warm in your body.”

In the distance, she can hear a truck gathering speed farther down the road. She plants her feet and waits. “Watch me.”

The truck swerves at the last minute, missing her but not the tree on the other side of the road. The noise is deafening, and it’s as she’s turning back to Sweeney on the side of the road that it catches her. She hears a bubbling, gurgling sound and just as quickly, realizes that it is her. A shiny piece of shrapnel has sliced her down on the middle.

Laura falls down to her knees, like her strings were cut and there is nothing left to hold her up. She feels as if something has gone loose inside of her. Something is slipping from her. She’s lost something. She—

And nothing. 

 

 

 

 

**22**

 

_“I pulled into Nazareth, just a feelin’ ‘bout a half past dead…”_

Laura’s arm jerks out only to freeze and hover over the clock radio.  A small spike of fear drives through her and she slams her hand down, shattering the clock radio into pieces. 

The quiet isn’t much better. She lays flat on her back and stares up. She is alone. She’s dead. Sweeney killed her. Laura bites the inside of her bottom lip as she presses her hand to her chest. She wants to know if she can feel his coin inside of her. 

She waits, and, as usual, she feels nothing.

 

 

 

 

**33**

 

She finds Sweeney at the Econo Lodge in Highbanks. Didn’t take much to get the front desk clerk to give up what room he’s in. The mention of an overgrown, surly Irishman and he was barking out, “Room 113.”

Laura had spent a few days, or a few deaths, sulking on her own. 

Sweeney never came by, and she can’t say if she appreciated that or not. Because the truth was, by the fifth death, she had come to the uncomfortable realization that she was outclassed by the prospect before her. How do you get your husband back from a fucking _god_? How do you stop dying? How do you stop repeating the same day, over and fucking over again? 

She stops in front of room 113. It’s not like Sweeney has any answers, but. He’s better than nothing. Maybe.

She considers slamming the door off its hinges, but instead settles on knocking. For now. 

He’s bleary-eyed when he finally opens the door, and Laura puts her hand on her hip. “Rise and shine,” she says.

“Fuck, it’s you.” He stumbles back into the room and she follows him. She flicks the blinds open as Sweeney face plants onto his mussed bed. He groans as he rolls over to look at her. He reaches for the mostly empty bottle of Southern Comfort on the nightstand. 

“You can stop licking your wounds now,” she says. “We’ve got places to be and lives to resurrect.”

He groans again. “I can’t believe I’m about to say it, but if your corpse and its surly mug aren’t the finest sights I’ve clapped eyes on in days, Dead Wife.”

“Can’t say I feel similarly.” It’s mostly true, she thinks. There’s a bizarre relief in seeing him again that she is desperate to distance herself from. She wants to chalk it up to loneliness, but she’s always been lonely. That’s nothing new, not even in death. She wrinkles up her nose. “How drunk are you?”

He waves a hand that could mean anything from _just a little_ to _not really_ to _sloshed beyond all belief._ “Learned myself a valuable lesson, I did.” His hands fumble with the bottle. “Further I get from my luck, and by unfortunate necessary extension your carcass, the worse life gets for Mad Sweeney.”

“Oh, boo hoo.” He offers her a fond smile all the same, the softness both weary and wrong, so she makes her own face harder. She glares at him.

“So. What now?”

“You missed my guidance?” His face lights up that much more.

“Did I say that? It’s not like I can google how to stop dying and find my husband, can I?”

Distaste curls his mouth. “I’m sure a parlay with the young lad Technical Boy could be arranged.”

“What?”

“Never you mind.”

“You say stuff like I have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“Not my fault you can’t keep up, love.”

She wishes she could get half as drunk as he is right now. She wishes she had anyone else to turn to. She wishes she was alive. If only Sweeney knew how to turn any tricks with wishes, she thinks wryly. She steps that much closer to Sweeney.

“So this guy Wednesday,” she says. 

“Yeah?” 

“He has Shadow?”

“He’s got your man.”

“And he had you kill me.”

“A man’s more conducive to Grimnir’s agendas when distractions and/or wives are dead,” he says with a shrug. “Especially when the wife in question is a battle axe, such as yourself.”

“Where is he?”

“Couldn’t tell you for certain, but I do know where he’s headed, Shadow in tow.” His reluctance is obvious as he pauses, like a solid wall built between them. 

She grabs his hand suddenly and she places it on her chest. She can feel the tendons of his wrist go taut but he doesn’t pull away.

“Do you feel that?” 

“What?” He snatches his hand back. “No. I don’t feel anything.” 

“Me either. That’s a problem.” Something that feels a lot like fear is trying to gain traction inside of her; she pushes it down deeper. “I’m dead, but I’m still dying. You get it?” He grits his teeth, the muscle at the hinge of his jaw jumping. For the first time since she met him, all those days and all that death ago, Sweeney looks impossibly old to her. Like maybe the things he tells her are true—he was a king, he serves a man with many names who isn’t a man but something greater and more terrible. He had a lucky coin and it’s that coin that’s keeping her alive.

“The House on the Rock,” he relents. “Wisconsin. He’s assembling the battalion for war.”

“You’re a bunch of fucking lunatics,” she says. She sighs. She lifts her eyes to him. “Well. Get your useless drunk ass up. Looks like we’re going to Wisconsin.”

 

 

 

 

**36**

 

She meets Technical Boy at the border of Indiana and Illinois. Or, rather, she meets his associates.  It’s further proof, she thinks, of cosmic interference. Something—someone—is stopping them.

They encounter them at a roadblock of sorts. Sweeney is driving fast down an empty back road, and as they crest over the top of a hill they spot them: men, lined up in a row down the middle of it.

“What the fuck,” Sweeney says between grit teeth. He starts to slow down.

“What’re you doing? Keep driving.”

“I’m not going to smash through the human traffic barricade. Vehicular homicide didn’t rank high on my list of things to fucking do today.”

Laura doesn’t say anything. She squints out at the line of men as they grow closer; they’re all anonymously similar. “Do you think they know where Shadow is?”

Sweeney snorts. He puts the car in park. “Sure, because everybody’s out here keeping tabs on your man.”

“Who are they?”

“No one you’d care to meet.”

Laura gets out of the car.

 

 

If it didn’t pain her to admit, she’d say that Sweeney was right. There’s a smaller man behind the row of henchmen, his smirk radiating obnoxious Twitter bro Gamer Gate bullshit even at a distance. He has been speaking for the last three minutes without break, snide idle threats she quit listening to two minutes ago. 

Like Laura: he wants Shadow, too. 

“Oh my god, I am so sick of this bullshit.” She glances over at Sweeney, her face sour.

“I know, I know,” he says. “I should’ve mowed them down.”

“I’d say ‘told you so,’ but I doubt it’d leave a dent,” and then they both charge forward. 

 

 

Laura’s never actually been in a fight before. Not a fight like this. Her violence has always been limited to the realm of the self-inflicted or the verbal. Which made sense, seeing as she barely broke one-hundred pounds soaking wet. It’s in death that she has embraced violence. The coin certainly helps. She gets it, in a way, why men like Sweeney behave like this. There is something viscerally, innately satisfying when her fist meets one of these assholes’ jaw and she shatters right through it in a mess of blood and teeth and bone. 

They take down the line of men easily enough. It’s regrettable, how well they work together. They play off of each other easily, a well-oiled machine, an understanding bred from instinct and maybe something deeper, more ungovernable than that. She pushes off of Sweeney’s bent knee and vaults herself up and over the last man standing. Her thighs wrap around his head effortlessly, wrench his neck to the side just as easily. His spine whips out of his back like a deboned fish. 

Technical Boy, Sweeney tells her between gasping breaths, is long gone. It’s hard to hear him over the ringing in her ears. She feels bright and brilliant, not alive exactly, but removed from her own body. She thinks that’s called adrenaline. She’s choosing to believe that’s what this is. Both of them are covered in blood and when she takes a step forward, her body lurches with it—forward, and into him.

He looks down at her in surprise. She can feel each ragged inhale of his breath like this. It makes her want to crawl inside his chest. It makes her want to rip him open and see if he looks like the dead men and their parts scattered around them. It makes her feel weak and like her head is spinning. 

Sweeney’s eyebrows knit together in confusion or concern or contempt, or all three. He puts a hand on her side to steady her. The pressure feels funny and just as fast he pulls his hand away. “Fucking hell, Dead Wife.”

She glances down. There’s a huge gash torn along her side, from her rib cage all the way down to her hip. Her insides are trying to escape to the outside.

“Shit,” she says. She pokes at her side and she can feel when Sweeney sucks in a breath. “Is it weird I don’t even feel that?” She tries to look back up at him, but her vision has started to swim. “Is that bad?” 

That’s when her legs give out beneath her. He follows her down to the cracked asphalt. 

This time, she dies in his arms.

“This sucks,” Laura says. Sweeney cocks his head and looks down at her. He brushes some of her hair and some blood off of her face with a tenderness she hopes she never actually earns from him. 

“Would you mind hurrying up with it?” He says it softly and she’d laugh but her mouth tastes like pennies and she can dimly feel something dripping down her chin. Sweeney’s mouth is moving again. She can’t figure out what he's saying. She wants to ask him to say it again. She wants—

 

 

 

 

**41**

 

She’s deader than usual. 

This morning, after she woke, after she cursed under her breath and began the routine she had started the last forty-two days with, she had looked in the mirror.  She was paler this time, her skin waxy and wan. No heartbeat. No breath. She was cold, miserably so, and she had piled on two sweaters and a heavy pair of socks.

“You better not start rotting under all that,” Sweeney said once they hit the road. She had the vents angled in her direction, the heat on full blast. His face was flushed and sweat had already cropped up along his hairline. Laura had shivered. 

And now, here they are, stopped for the night. Their progress west has been slow-going at best. Trying to outwit both time and death is an exhausting and terribly careful endeavor. Sweeney had taken the exit, the glowing red neon of a sign advertising a roadside motel and its vacancy. And it’s here, a motel in the middle of Nowhere, Illinois, where the only room available is a corny honeymoon suite.

Laura unlocks the door and is met by the headboard of the bed in the shape of a giant heart. The bedspread is a worn velvet that Laura hates to even speculate what depravity it might have born witness to. A cheap bottle of drugstore champagne is set in a bucket of melted ice. 

“Charming,” Laura says.

Sweeney flicks a finger at the bouquet of dead flowers set next to the television; a sign reading, “OUT OF ORDER” blocks the screen. “I’d say it’s a honeymoon suite befitting a wife already deceased.”

Before Laura can respond, they realize they are not alone. 

A beautiful woman, her skin dark and gleaming, steps out of the adjoining bathroom. Sweeney groans. 

“Bilquis,” he says on a nod. “These your haunts now?”

“I go where they will have me.” She cocks her head to the side. “Why the long face, Mad Sweeney? I come to offer my aid,” she says. Sweeney, for once, says nothing to that. Laura immediately latches on the distrust building in her. 

“Am I supposed to know who she is?” Laura says.

In introduction, Bilquis cradles Laura’s face in her hands. She caresses down her cheeks and her hands are soft and cool. Laura finds she wants to lean into her touch, but she resists and pulls away. 

“Death suits this one,” Bilquis says. Her eyes are dark as they bore into Laura’s.

“Oh. Uh. Thanks?”

“So, what? You come to offer your aid, you say? You think you can help Madame Wormfood here?” Sweeney interrupts. Bilquis eyes him curiously. His shoulders slump that much more and he scowls. “Don’t look at me like that. It’s not like that. Nothing like that. Don’t go getting ideas. I’ve got a personal interest in her full and complete resurrection that’s got nothing to do with her, living or dead.”

Bilquis turns her gaze back to Laura and Laura finds it difficult to look away. Laura feels a hand at her elbow, the grip too tight. She bats at Sweeney’s hand but he only leans in closer. There’s something stupid like concern shaded over his face. 

“You best wise up, Dead Wife, and consider yourself forewarned. The Queen of Sheba’ll want her due before she goes giving you your Easter Sunday.”

She jerks her arm out of his grip. “Like what?” she hisses. “I don’t have any money.”

“You never got any fucking money.” He steps back from her, and that wariness is back on his face as he looks over to Bilquis. “It’s cute you think that’s a currency the Queen’d trade in though, I’ll tell you that.”

“What? Is she gonna want my fucking thumbs or something?” She turns back to Bilquis. “You don’t want my thumbs, do you?“

“Quiet, now,” Bilquis says. She comes closer. “I am the goddess of love, and love is all I know. That is no small thing. I can offer bliss, and I can offer pleasure. But life? No, no. An intermediary is needed for that.”

Laura frowns. “Okay, where do we find an intermediary?”

Bilquis draws her hand down Laura’s throat—she can’t help but swallow—to her chest. It rises and falls temporarily under her hand. Bilquis face falls before it lights with something else. She looks over Laura’s shoulder at Sweeney.

“You’re already inside the girl,” she says.

Laura takes a step back. Her legs crash into the edge of the bed. “Excuse me?”

“The leprechaun is in you. There is nothing I can offer but the old magic. The oldest magic of all,” Bilquis says.

“For fuck’s sake,” Sweeney says.

Bilquis smiles. “Yes. Exactly.”

 

 

The old magic, much like the oldest profession in the world, is sex.

“That’s a thing?” Laura says. 

“As I said, the oldest magic of them all,” Bilquis says.

“You’re telling me I got to share not only my luck, but my cock with this rotting sack of meat?”

“I’m not rotting,” Laura says. She takes a surreptitious sniff at her shoulder all the same. She doesn’t smell anything, but then maybe that’s a part of being dead, too. “You’re expecting him to fuck me back to life?” she asks Bilquis. “I think you are greatly overestimating what this guy can manage with his dick.”

“I can manage my dick fine, but I’ll tell you right now, I’m not fucking a corpse. Let the record state. A man’s got to draw a line somewhere. Corpse-fucking? There’s my fucking line.”

“I’m not a corpse, I’m just dead.”

“Your girl is caught between two states,” Bilquis says. “Two places, the living and the dead. You are what will join her.”

“She is not my girl,” Sweeney says with great rancor.

“I’m not,” Laura adds.

She makes the mistake of looking over towards Sweeney. He is glaring down at her, like she is both the source and solution for all of his problems, and hey, it’s not like the feeling isn’t miserably mutual. 

“Will I get my coin back?” He asks the question of Bilquis, his voice low and resigned, but he is still looking at Laura. Just like that, she knows he’s relenting. She knows that she is, too. 

“Mad Sweeney. You will get what you want.”

 

 

The room is darkened now, protected and intimate. This room is suddenly the most important place for her to be, and where she had seen only a shabby motel, it is now fit for royalty—dead or otherwise.

She can almost forget Bilquis is watching from the corner. 

“You are so much fucking work,” Sweeney is grumbling as he takes off his clothes. 

“You should have thought about that before you killed me.”

He’s not hard. She’s not insulted. Not really. She watches him pull at himself with a morbid, distant fascination. He’s big, she thinks. Shadow was big, too, and she thinks the two of them have traveled enough distance and nursed enough hurt for her to admit that was one of the things she liked best about him. There was something about feeling like you were about to be ripped apart, on the precipice of dying or at the least wishing for death each time you fucked somebody. It makes this both better and worse for her to think of Shadow. It gives her a reason, at the least, for what she is about to do. A plausible deniability of sorts. Nothing new there. 

She watches Sweeney approach the bed. Her own body is bared too, but she is no longer as cold as she had been earlier. She swallows as he stands over her, silently chastises herself for it. It’s not like sex has ever meant anything to her anyway. They’re both just bodies that need something from each other. 

“Are you going to get on the bed, or what?” she snaps. 

He does. She straddles his lap, quick and efficient. Business-like, she thinks. She tentatively eyes his cock again.

“Is that thing going to fit?” She regrets saying it near immediately if only for the smug expression on his face.

He snorts, but his mouth has tilted upward anyway. Men, fucking men, she thinks. “It always does,” he says, not without a fair bit of pride.

Laura grabs him by the base and Sweeney makes a choked-off sound. “Easy now,” he breathes. He’s heavy and thick and alive in her hand, hot against her skin. Something squirms and turns over inside of her, imagining that ( _fuck_ , him) inside of her. _He already is_ , she tells herself, but she pushes that thought down, too. She positions herself over him to sink down onto his cock.

He stills her, his grip bruising and tight on her hips.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he says. Sweeney's voice already has a ragged edge to it. She supposes even a dead girl like herself poised spread-legged over your dick is still enough to get most men going.

“What’s it look like I’m doing? You do know how to fuck, right?”

“Of course I fucking know how to fuck. I mean,” and he sighs, the sound of the long-suffering and the martyred. She resists the urge to roll her eyes. He slots a hand between her legs without any grace, his fingers thick as they push against but not into her cunt. “Dry as a fucking cemetery bone. I’m flattered.” He lifts his face to hers. “What? You still want me to hurry on with it? You want that as a literal gash between your legs?”

Her mouth turns down into a scowl. “Jesus. And you think that kind of talk is gonna get me wet?”

He leans forward. He is watching her carefully as he closes the distance between them. She panics, one delirious moment, that he is going to kiss her. She doesn’t move and he does not kiss her. His mouth is at her ear instead, his breath hot, and she envies him for that.

“I know exactly the kind of talk that gets a girl like you wet.”

And the dumbest part is that he does. He calls her selfish, tells her that he knows she’d want it to be all about her. He tells her what he would do to her if he really wanted to get her wet. If he cared. As he talks, he pauses to spit on his fingers and he slips his fingers back between her legs. Inside of her. He opens her up on his fingers. He tells her how he would use his mouth, if he thought she was worth the effort. That he would taste her, make her beg for it, and Laura can feel her body react to him, shame flushing through her almost as heated and quick as her desire to fuck him. She’s used to either sexual desire at a distance, as if it is the echo of the real thing so might as well fuck, or as he described: selfish. This feels different. Hungry and demanding, as if even before she died there was this yawing great dark emptiness inside of her that no one has ever been able to fill. He makes a low sound deep in his throat as he finds her wet, the small minute push of her hips towards him. As if he found a secret about her she desperately wanted to keep from him. 

Fuck him. Literally, she supposes.

Even with her panting and wet, it takes time for her to work herself down onto his cock. Sweeney gasps and snarls the entire way, his fingers digging into her skin. “That’s it,” he says when she finally settles, seated fully on him. Jesus Christ, she feels like he has impaled straight through the middle of her. His hand is huge as he rubs it up and down her back. “That’s a good girl, that’s it.”

“Shut the fuck up,” she snaps. She clamps her hand down over his mouth in case he’s tempted to say anything like that again. She slowly starts to ride him, leveraging herself up on her knees only to rock back onto him, wincing at first at the burn. The ache of him inside of her is insane, but it’s good, it’s real. If she closes her eyes, she can almost picture herself, back at home, the cover of the hot tub stretched over her. The noxious sting of bug spray caught in her nose and her throat, the most alive she had ever felt as she struggled to breathe. It’s that terrible kind of good, and it only spurs her on faster.

Sweeney starts to lick at her hand, at the webbing between her fingers, in the cracks between them, filthy, and she pictures his mouth down between her legs, licking at her cunt as he had described to her. A sound escapes her mouth that almost sounds like relief and Sweeney’s hips thrust up into her. He punches another sound out of her. Fuck, she can feel that. She can feel him. She can feel—

She comes, or she starts to come and she does not stop. It’s as if she is roped into a new circuit, a new loop, and much as she can’t stop dying, she can’t seem to stop coming. She can feel noise pushing out of her throat but her ears fill full, she can’t hear herself, she’s electric and alive and overwhelmed. Her hand drops down from his mouth, and she pulls at his hair. Her hands grapple at his shoulders as she bears down on him, demanding more. She always wants _more_. 

With a snarling gasp, Sweeney pulls her off of him. She lunges back towards him but he presses her into the mattress. “You have to stop,” he says in between gasps.

Laura writhes under him—he’s still hard, his cock obscene and wet with her, with him. “Stop being a coward and fuck me.”

“The Queen has gone beyond her mandate.” The words are so bizarre and out of place that Laura stills under him.

“What?” she spits out. 

“Don’t you feel it?” His chest heaves as his breath begins to settle. “She’s feeding off of us.”

There is a quiet chuckle from the corner of the room. Bilquis sits there, her face as blissful as if she had been on the bed with them. 

“Mad Sweeney, you are unmoored in time, in life and death. What better way to spend it?”

“This is no resurrection, is it?”

“Ask the girl—since you put your hands on her, has she felt alive?” Beneath the fog of whatever this is, Laura can feel a pale imitation of her usual fury rise.

Above her, Sweeney takes several hard breaths in. The memory of his chest pressed to hers already feels very far away and like something the worst parts of her imagination invented. She reaches a hand forward and traces a line down the center of his chest. He glances down in surprise and then swats her hand away.

“Are you going to take me?” he says.

Bilquis only laughs, low, seductive, and she rises to her feet. Laura squirms. Bilquis approaches the bed and she looms over the both of them. Sweeney’s grip on her hip tightens that much more.

Bilquis drags a thumb over Sweeney’s mouth.

“No,” she says. “You, Mad Sweeney, have developed too much a taste for death.”

And then—she’s gone. The motel room is seedy now and one of the bed springs digs into Laura’s back. She feels sticky and sore, on edge instead of satisfied. Used. She shoves at him but without any of her strength. “Get the fuck off of me.”

Sweeney complies willingly. He stands, naked, and storms across the room to where he left his clothes. Laura yanks her own pants on, her rage finally bubbling over within her.

“You tricked me,” she says. 

“I tricked you?” She looks away from him as he pulls his shirt over his shoulders. “That’s fucking rich, that is.”

“You tricked me,” she says again. She wants a shower. She wants to close her eyes and have everything that has happened since the first time she died be the bad dream she had thought it was the morning after. 

He exhales noisily and stalks towards her.

“You think I’m that hot for your undead cunt I’d strike a compact with the Queen of fucking Sheba to fool you into bed? Think again, Dead Wife.”

He leans forward above her. “I have just as much at stake as you do. I needs my luck back. You need my luck to live. As you can see, and as you previously stated in one of your _many_ lifetimes, we are at an impasse. I find a way to shuffle you back onto the mortal coil, I get my coin back. You get your life back. Everyone goes home happy.” His throat bobs as he swallows. “And I will do anything to achieve that. And I think you will, too.”

Laura says nothing. She crosses her arms tightly over her chest.

“You’re trapped,” Sweeney says. “And I am the closest thing to a friend you got.” He pulls back from her and plucks a cigarette from his jacket pocket. He places it in his mouth. “Cheer up, could be worse.”

“Fuck you,” she says. She slams the motel room door behind her and stands there, alone, in the parking lot. 

She didn’t lie to herself before—it’s not like sex has ever meant anything to her. Sex has always served as a reactive impulse for her. Something to do because it’s better than doing nothing. Her first time was in Tom Atherton’s older brother’s garage after the both of them huffed paint and she was so bored she might’ve done anything. Spray-painted profanity on his brother’s car, drove a drill bit through her thigh, started kicking Tom until she grew tired or he made her stop. Fucking him was easier than any of that. When he was inside her, he had said, “I always thought I’d lose my virginity to someone with bigger tits.” She fucked his older brother not long after that. He tasted like beer and grass and discontent—a taste she was well familiar with as it lived permanently on her own tongue—and he lasted longer than his brother. That didn’t mean he was much better. What followed after was a string of fucking that varied from enjoyable enough to as boring as the reality she attempted to avoid and left her very rarely satisfied. She fucked Shadow the first night she met him, and she liked both that and the mild violence she could drag from him when she slapped him in the face. Before that, it was the pit boss at the casino, this conclusion of consummation first assumed and then all but assured during her interview for the job. 

It’s nothing, she tells herself, even if she can still feel him between her legs. Even if she knows he’s at her back. Even if, maybe, unfortunately, he’s all she has.

 

 

 

 

**42**

 

Laura spends the better part of her day waiting for Sweeney to show up. That’s the usual routine, or it has been: he shows up at her place and they head out in her car for whatever harebrained plot to resurrect her is their current agenda. 

“Fuck it,” she mutters to herself.

She gets behind the wheel and she stills, the key in the ignition but she yet to turn it. She could just start the car and sit here, the garage door closed, and wait for the carbon monoxide to take her out. Start again, or maybe not. The universe or gods or just time itself has to get sick of her eventually. She shakes her head. She clicks the garage door opener and the door lurches up. 

She drives, Wisconsin as the destination in mind, but she finds herself driving out towards Highbanks. She passes the Econo Lodge and pulls into the shitty looking bar plunked down next to it. 

Laura goes in, and sure enough, even in the gloom of the bar’s interior she sees him. Sweeney, hunched over the polished pock-marked bar top, a glass of something gleaming and amber in his hand, well-smudged with his fingerprints. Or just his fingers; she wonders if gods have fingerprints. She’ll have to ask some other time.

“There you are,” she says. She pops up onto the stool beside him. He sways a little. His head swivels in her general direction, as if it’s too heavy for his neck to support. He is fucking bombed.

“Oh, fuck. She lives.”

“Was that in any doubt?”

“Only in my dreams, Dead Wife.”

She meets his bleary eyes. “So, my vote is, we never, ever talk about what happened in that podunk Illinois motel room from hell, and we just. Try to move forward. We keep going. We get Shadow, I get resurrected, you get your coin, the order doesn’t matter, and then we never have to see each other again.”

Sweeney doesn’t say anything. She can smell the whiskey oozing out of his pores. 

“Hi, do we have a deal or what?”

He finally looks over at her. “Have you considered that your problem might be less mortality based and more a question of time?”

“Great. Do all gods speak in riddles when they’re shit-faced?”

“Let’s say you find your man, and then five seconds later, you’re struck down. I’m not sure if it’s past your notice, but since meeting you—”

“Since killing me,” she says.

He rolls his eyes, which is sort of offensive coming from her murderer. “Since I killed you, you’ve easily died more than a few dozen times. You lived your life before with the scythe so close to your neck I’m not sure how you made it a year, let alone twenty-seven.”

“What the fuck is your point?”

“Death and time have got their eyes on you. You should be snug in your grave, six feet under. You shouldn’t be waking up each day, reliving the day that was your last.”

“Yeah, no shit. Again, your point?”

“Time’s got you on the run, Dead Wife. It’s the rug that keeps getting pulled out from under you, keeping you from your dear, dear cuckold of a husband.”

“Time,” she repeats. She ignores the rest.

“Who you really need to talk to is Kronos, but he’s the last fucking cunt I want to see.”

“Kronos? Let me guess, the God of Time?”

He grunts in assent. “Got himself a little watch repair shop over on West Belmont in Chicago.”

“So we need to go to Chicago.”

“Not need, should. I got nothing doing seeing that piece of work.”

“Dry out, bury the hatchet or whatever grudge you have with the God of fucking Time unless you want to keep popping up in this shit hole.”

He glares at her. “You think you can survive long enough to get to Chicago?”

“I’m going to have to.” She smiles, the stretch of her mouth mocking and ugly. “And you’re going to come with me.”

“Like hell I am.”

“I still have your coin.”

“Holding my luck ransom, and you wonder why a man might not want to share company with you. She’s a genius, this dead one is,” he says in the bartender’s general direction.

“Ha, ha. Okay. Let’s go.”

“I told you. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Excuse me?”

“My grand plan until you get your clock reset is to get as drunk as divinely possible. I am tired of ferrying you up and down the River Styx looking for a cure. A man needs his day of rest.”

“Um, first off? Fuck you. Second, the sooner we get this,” and she gestures up and down her body, “fixed, the sooner you get what you want. So, again, let’s go.”

He waves at her. “Nah. Off you go. Go and try to find the God of Wristwatches or your little puppy and pray the grim reaper doesn’t meet you en route. Steer clear of grifters and semi-trucks and any rusty nails.”

“And if I find him and then proceed to drop dead?”

He leans in close. She’s reminded, whether she wants it or not, of the last time he had been that close to her. Her eyes slip down to his mouth. That mouth twists into something too lazy to be called a smirk. “Looks like you’d have to try again, Dead Wife. And again after that. And again. And again.” He knocks his fist against the bar. “Another, please and thank you.”

“So you’re not coming with me.”

“No. No, I most certainly am not.” He picks up his refilled glass and drains it. “I’ll be here when you get back.”

“Do you think that Kronos guy can really fix this?”

“God of Time, no reason he couldn’t try.” He smacks his lips. “Leave the bottle this time, yeah?” he says to the bartender.

“Yeah, but I don’t know where he is. You’re going to have to take me.”

Sweeney picks up the bottle and he drinks from it, his glass abandoned. “‘I need to find Shadow,’” he mimics. “‘I need you to take me to Chicago.’ You’re as selfish in death as you were in life, I swear it.” He swallows. “Half-life, I suppose. Whatever it is you’re doing every single fucking day.”

“I’m on a fucking hamster wheel.”

He snorts. Coughs. “That’s life, that is, logistics, and you, I suppose, be damned.”

“And aren’t you damned too then? Turning up here each time I die?”

Sweeney glances around. “Decent whiskey, minimal company, a man could scarcely dream for more.”

She tries a different angle. She leans in towards him. “But don’t you want your coin back?”

“I’ll say it again—fuck you for holding that over my head like a fucking carrot on a stick.”

“Giddy up, and maybe you get it back.”

“Fuck you, Dead Wife.”

“Well, if we’re not going anywhere.” Laura reaches and she takes the bottle from him. It burns as it goes down, but that’s it. No real taste. Fuck, she misses booze. She takes another swill all the same, notes the glimmer of surprise from him.

“That was scarcely an invitation,” he says.

She shrugs. She smacks her lips and tries to drink more. "I don’t think I’m biologically capable of getting drunk anyway.”

 

 

They spend the remainder of the day, and well into the evening, at the bar. Despite his other sins, and there are many, she has begun to find that he is alarmingly easy to talk to. 

"This whole time, it’s not that I've been afraid of death," she hears herself saying, like she's on a fucking day-time talk show or something. "It’s been an inconvenience. Something I wanted to avoid.”

“Death defines a man as much as life.”

“You get that from a fortune cookie?”

Sweeney’s smile is both grim and knowing. He goes into some spiel about battle; she's not really listening. Shadow used to tell her that, she's a terrible listener. There is a madness to what Sweeney is saying though, heated and spiked with an existential dread she has always intimately known but a terror she has never felt.

“Have you ever died?” She doesn’t mean to ask it, but it’s out of her mouth before she thinks it through.

“No.” He says it clipped, brokering no follow-up questions. He holds the bottle but he doesn’t drink from it. “I fled. I was to die, and so I ran. I’ve owed a battle ever since.” 

Laura doesn’t stop it when her mouth twists cruelly. She’s relieved to escape the intimacy of this conversation.

“That makes you a coward then, doesn’t it?”

He wears the word with bitter pride. His eyes are dark and hot when they fix on her. “I suppose it does if you fucking say so.” He drinks. He’s still looking at her like he can see her for what she really is, too.

So Laura eventually does what she always does. She makes it about something else, something distant from herself. Something that makes it so easy for a person to be selfish. Sex.

She places her hand down on his thigh. He eyes her, more prey than predatory. 

“You’re impossible, you know that?”

She moves her hand higher, the denim worn and his skin heated beneath. “And you’re a coward.”

He growls, low in his throat. “I am going to bend you over the first flat surface I find, I swear it to you. Is that what you want?”

Laura slips her fingers along the inseam of his jeans, dangerously close to where he wants her. Where she wants to touch him. “And what?”

“Fuck the ever-loving life out of you, Dead Wife.”

“Promises, promises.” She gets up and she heads over to the restroom. There is no doubt in her mind that he’ll follow her.

 

 

He doesn’t get her bent over, but instead pressed up against the wall.

The worst thing to ever happen to her, other than dying, is discovering how good Sweeney is at fucking her. She’s overstimulated by him so easily. Laura claws at his arms, furious and helpless feeling, as his hand works between her legs. He fingers her until he’s wet down to his wrist and she's as demanding as she ever is. “Fuck me,” she keeps saying under her breath.

Sweeney hoists her up easily and fits himself between her open thighs. He’s as big as she remembers as he pushes into her. “Jesus Christ,” she gasps.

“Let’s not bring Him into this.”

He fucks her, brutal and rough. Laura is operating on a plane of thinking that lays no consequences and even fewer responsibilities at her feet. If she’s fucking him, it’s his fault. She’s dead. She’s just a body, and if it wants things, it wants things. You can’t blame her for that. You can never blame her for anything at all.

“You’ll do anything to a warm body, won’t you? Shadow, Robbie. Me.” He wants this mean, and that’s good. That’s really good. His hand all but spans her waist and she wonders what would happen if he squeezed her harder. She wonders at all the different ways to kill a person. To kill her. For him to kill her.

She thinks of what Bilquis had said. She tips her head back against the wall and looks down at him. “You’re already inside of me. What the fuck does it matter now?”

Sweeney’s face does something funny she doesn’t want to name. He rolls his hips up into her. “Yeah. What the fuck’s it matter.” He says the words like they’re in code, and maybe they are. Maybe that’s the only language they’ll ever be able to speak with each other—always saying the opposite of what they mean. If she wants to be alive, she’ll have to live with the things she has done. She thinks she can live with this.

They’re aggressive and uncaring with each other, but that’s good, too. She grabs onto the paper towel dispenser as he fucks up into her. Her grips tears it from the wall and she slouches back, her weight supported solely by him. 

“I’m not gonna help you anymore,” he says into the skin of her neck. The words would mean more if they weren’t said so breathlessly, so stupidly desperate, like even inside of her he can’t get enough. She doesn’t say anything; she’s too afraid all that would come out of her mouth is the needy moan stuck in her throat. He’s saying more than enough for the both of them.

“What more do you want from me?” he says, his mouth at her jaw now. 

Laura wants to tell him: everything. People like her, she knows, are parasites. They take and they take and they take until they’ve had their fill, and then they move on. Sometimes she wonders what would have happened with Shadow if he hadn’t gone down for their sad attempt at a casino heist. Would she still have eventually fucked Robbie? If she hadn’t fucked Robbie, would it have been some other man? Some other cock she died with in her mouth? Would she have tired of Shadow the way she tired of everything? Had she already? Probably. No, not probably. Yes. She would have. Because that’s what she does. That’s what you do when you’re as empty as she is: you take. You drink until you’re full and then you’re gone.

Her body clenches around him, her cunt tight around his cock. Her shoulder blades ache against the tiled wall and her thighs have begun to tremble and shake against his ribs. It’s been so long since she was fucked like this. With intent. With Robbie, it was perfunctory. Like a bodily reflex. With Shadow—there is no room for Shadow here. 

Laura comes suddenly, as if by surprise. Unexpected. Like she really maybe thought he couldn’t make her. 

 

 

After, she walks out of the bathroom on shaky legs and straight into an armed robbery in progress.

“Oh, come on,” she says. 

 

 

 

 

**43**

 

“It’s fine,” Laura says to him. She’s met by the blast of cold air-conditioned air as she enters the bar she had just violently departed. “I didn’t want to live a life where I had willingly fucked you. No offense.”

He slams back his whiskey. “None taken.”

“You’re drinking already?”

“Breakfast of champions.”

 

 

 

 

**49**

 

Chicago looms ahead. Laura stretches her arms overhead as Sweeney fiddles with the radio dial. 

“Let's say we make this work. He’s not going to love me anymore, is he?” She lifts her eyes to him. “You don’t have to actually answer that.”

“Well, now I have to,” he says on a yawn. “Probably not. You did die with another man’s dick in your mouth.”

Her anger lashes that much tighter to her chest, like a boa constrictor. Even if she manages to make Shadow love her again, even if she can make him see her the way he used to, all it’s going to take is some random accident and she’s right back at the start and all that work will be undone. All that love is gone.

She says as much out loud, and Sweeney laughs.

“That’s always the way of it, isn’t it?” Sweeney says. “Any one morning can come along and that faith is gone.”

“I wasn’t talking about faith,” she snaps.

“One and the same,” he says.

“What’s the point of any of this then?"

“Futility is a part of life, woman.” Sweeney says. He grips the steering wheel with one hand. “If you want so much to rejoin the land of the living and fleshy and meaty, I suggest you embrace it now. Better now than later.”

“It’s not that,” she says after a pause. “It’s—it reinforces what I always fucking knew. Nothing matters. There’s no point to anything. You wake up, you live, you die. That’s it. Nothing fucking matters.”

“That’s what you’re getting outta all this.” There’s no rancor in his voice, but the judgment is there. She scowls. He of all people doesn’t get to make her feel like an asshole. 

“Gee, Professor Fuckface, why don’t you enlighten me?”

“You know what a penance is? It’s punishment. More often than not with the gods, it’s the worst kind of irony. You live and you die and you get to live again and you walk away from that to say nothing fucking matters? You’re dumber than you look, Dead Wife.”

“Fuck off.”

“What is it you even want?”

She doesn’t like the directness, the bluntness of the question. “I want my life back. I want Shadow.”

“That’s what you want,” he says. Like he doesn’t believe her.

“That’s what I said,” she says. Like she doesn’t know if she believes herself. 

 

 

 

 

**54**

 

Kronos is late.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” A man, short and squat with a pair of round-framed spectacles hiding his eyes, bustles out of the backroom.  “I know, I know—time is money! What can I do the pair of you for?”

“You can cut the act,” Sweeney says.

“Mad Sweeney, and in a shop of mine. The end times must be as near as they say they are, yes?”

“Something like that.” Sweeney braces his folded arms on the edge of the display case and leans in towards Kronos. “I was hoping you could do if not a kindness then a favor for us.”

“I’ll have to see if I have the time!” He looks to Laura. “We have fun here.”

“Sure,” she says. 

Laura listens impatiently as Sweeney explains their current situation to the God of Time, and she watches Kronos’s face light with genuine happiness.

“This is a truly extraordinary turn of events. And you come to me!”

“Yeah,” Laura says, “we were kinda hoping you could fix it.”

“Fix it? The first bit of interesting time trickery to happen in a dog’s age, and you ask me to undo it? I shall not, and I will not.”

“Um, fuck you and your fake fucking Rolexes,” she says.

“You see?” Kronos points to her. “This is why I have no patience for humans, not anymore. They have no reverence for time! Everything is a rush. Hurry, hurry, hurry. Now, now, now. I know, I know—I only have myself to blame. Where do you think the New York Minute came from?”

“So, that’s it? I’m fucked? I’ll be on this loop forever and my husband will always be just out of reach?”

“Your husband?” Kronos’s interest has returned. “I thought she was yours, Mad Sweeney.”

“I’m not anyone’s,” Laura snaps. 

“Her husband goes by the name Shadow Moon,” Sweeney says.

“Shadow Moon,” Kronos says. “He has gone on, far ahead.”

“He’s dead?” Laura’s hands ball up into fists.

“Goodness no! He travels ahead of you, and he gets farther every day. You travel now on different wheels of time. His journey has gone forward, but your own? Your wheel spins in place. You cannot catch him, not until you come unstuck.”

“I’m stuck in time?”

“In the least eloquent of terms, yes.”

“Well, you wanna bust out the time crowbar and lend a hand and get me unstuck and rolling down the road?”

“That is not for me to manage.”

“I beg your fucking pardon?”

“It is a god who has done this to you. Your death. I cannot interfere with such bargains.” He rummages in the display case beneath the counter. “I can offer you this pocket watch however. Low, low price of $69.95!”

 

 

“All your friends are assholes,” Laura says once they’re back out on the street. The sky has gone a funny shade of puke green, flat and fake-looking. Sort of like the sky before a storm, but somehow more vivid and more threatening. 

“They’re not my friends. More like,” he waves his hand, “coworkers, at best.”

Laura points up at the sky. “What’s the deal with all this? More bullshit from your coworkers?”

“Fuck,” is all Sweeney says. 

They pass an electronics repair shop and the same grim face is on each TV screen and computer screen inside the store. The face suddenly bares teeth and that one doomsday clock from the Cold War or whatever lights up the screen followed by an image of an atomic bomb exploding. 

“That can’t be good,” Laura says. Sweeney confirms for her: it’s very much so not.

“I gotta confess, I’m a wee bit insulted they didn’t wait to for me to start the war,” Sweeney says. Car alarms start blaring all at once, up and down the street, the noise deafening. It’s sort of like those apocalypse scenes in those movies Laura’s never actually watched. “Now wouldn’t be a bad time for you to,” and he draws a finger along his throat, pulls what she guess passes for a dead face, all lolling tongue and bulging eyes.

“I’m tired of car accidents." She says it the same way she might have said she’s tired of late-night shifts or broccoli or having to empty the dishwasher. 

“Alright,” he says, but suspicion has crept into his voice.

She pauses at the mouth of an alley. “I think you should kill me. Again.”

“You’re a fucked-up little one, aren’t you.” There’s no question to the statement, and he’s looking at her with a worry that would better suit if she had asked if she could kill him rather than the other way around. 

“Don’t act like you don’t know how.” She leans back against the grimy wall of the alley. Doesn’t matter if she gets dirty; she’ll be dead soon. “Don’t act like you haven’t thought about fitting your hands around my throat every single minute since you met me.”

“Every single minute might be a bit of an over-exaggeration,” he says, but that’s not a no.

He is close enough that she can reach for his hand. He lets her take it. For a god, he is impossibly easy to handle like this. She briefly wonders what all she could get him to do. If he’s at all like Shadow. She looks up into Sweeney’s face and finds him darkly glaring down at her, and she was wrong. She was so wrong. He’s nothing like him. She lifts his hand to her throat and he fits his grip around her throat loosely.

“Don’t be a pussy. It’s not like you haven’t done this to me already.”

He squeezes her throat experimentally. It makes her clench between her legs. That’s fucked up.

“There’s a difference to be found in a death delivered at a distance.” His teeth are grit tight and his jaw clenches, the tendons in his neck standing out in stark relief. He comes that much closer to her and squeezes again. “You,” he breathes, not without a touch of awe, “are the worst thing to ever happen to me.”

“So kill me,” she whispers.

He does. It’s shockingly good in its horror. It’s something, she can admit now, that she has always wanted. That’s she’s fantasized about, gasping for breath in her backyard. She wanted someone else to do it for her.

Sweeney’s face is the last thing she sees. Her body twitches and her vision shrinks, blackens, and her hands slap at his arms but he doesn’t stop. 

She’s gotta give him points for follow-through.

 

 

 

 

**55**

 

She comes back to herself, in her bed. She sits up gasping and clutches a hand to her throat. 

As usual, she meets up with Sweeney later. They go to a diner not nearly far enough from Eagle Point. “Mama-ji’s territory,” he says, as if Laura knows what any of that means, but Mama-ji doesn’t show. 

“Doesn’t bode well for us.”

Laura cuts her eyes to him. “Okay. So Kronos was a bust and the world ended, and now this, so, what?”

Sweeney fills his side of the booth, all lazy sprawl of limbs. “I’ve played my hand. I’m out.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Mama-ji was my last favor to call in, and she ain’t here.”

“So, that’s it? We’re out of options? What good are you to me?”

Sweeney gives her a pointed look. “There is one more option.”

“Okay, let’s do that one.”

“It’s Grimnir.”

“You say that like I should say, oh no not him.”

“You should be saying that. That’s exactly what you should be saying.”

“I know he’s your boss and you’re, like, super scared of him or whatever—”

“I am not afraid of Grimnir, fuck off.”

“—but I have nothing to fear, and if he’s the one who can fix this for once and for all, I say we got nothing to lose.”

“He’s the cunt that killed you, Dead Wife. I’d say you got yourself plenty to fear.”

“I die all the time,” she shrugs. 

“Yeah, about that.”

She crosses her arms over her chest. Her mouth tips up as she notes his discomfort. “Don’t tell me you’re going to get weird about the whole,” she puts her hands around her throat. “You loved it.”

“I’ll confess, shutting your gob surely ranks as a top fantasy of mine, but I always imagined other, better methods to achieve it.” He mimes a dick in his mouth and Laura scoffs.

“You act like you’re so innocent. Like you didn’t kill me once already.”

He leans forward, his hands on the table very close to her own. “You keep bringing that up.”

“Yeah. Can’t help but take it personally. My murder, and all.”

“Last time I killed you I didn’t have to wring your fucking neck.”

Their waitress blanches beside the table, the check held frozen in her hand.

“Oh, grow up,” Laura snaps at her. She snatches the check out of her hand. “And you, too,” she says, facing Sweeney now. “You fucking loved it.”

His face drops into an uncomfortable grimace. It’s the sort of face she imagines she would make if ever she was forced to endure therapy. It is a face reserved for uncovered deep personal truths you would rather not have learned about yourself. Sweeney fiddles with a cigarette but he does not raise it to his mouth. 

“It’s was fucking intimate, was what it bloody was,” he says, that pained expression still on his face. She doesn’t like that—both his face and what he just said.

She thrusts the check at him. “You can pay,” she says.

 

 

 

 

**59**

 

Laura wakes. She screams at the top of her lungs. She drags her dead body out of bed.

“If I don’t go outside, I can’t die,” she tells her reflection in the mirror.

She goes into the kitchen. She fills up the kettle. She sets it on the stove. She turns the dial on the gas. The explosion is instantaneous.

 

 

 

 

**60**

 

“ _I pulled into Nazareth—_ ”

The clock radio goes off, the first strains of that fucking song she hopes she never in her life or any other life has to hear again. Laura picks up the radio and she throws it against the wall. 

She tosses her arm over her eyes and makes a decision: she will not get out of bed. 

She used to do this a lot. Back, before. When she was alive. When she was first Laura McCabe and then Laura Moon. Those Lauras had days where the very idea of leaving her bed was an impossibility not even worth entertaining. It was never because she was too sad or she was too afraid or anything that might make any sense to anyone else should she have ever attempted to explain it. It was simply because there was no point. She did the same thing, day-in and day-out. Se fed the cat, she fed herself, she went to the casino and she dealt the cards, she sat on her couch and she watched late night TV. She crawled into bed and some days she stayed there, the lone and lonely break in the routine.

She is back in a routine again. This one, while far more bizarre and far more lethal, has finally reached that same stage of exhausted effort for her. What is the fucking point.

So she stays in bed, naked, bunched under the covers. Since she broke the clock, she can’t say how long it takes before she hears the door kicked open down the hall and for Sweeney to eventually be there, standing in her bedroom. 

“There she is, Sleeping fucking Beauty. And here I had thought something truly interesting might have happened, like your actual and final demise, and I could finally come and collect my rightful property.”

She scowls. “My corpse?”

He scowls back. “My coin.”

He settles at the edge of the bed and the mattress shifts under his weight. He starts to roll himself a cigarette. “Got yourself a case of the blues, is that it?” He glances at her over his shoulder. 

“Oh, fuck off. Don’t,” she waves her hand, not entirely sure what she is trying to say. “Don’t trivialize me.”

“Wasn’t.” It’s all he says, the cigarette clamped between his lips. The silence is uncomfortable between them, it scratches at her. Makes her want to scratch at him. 

“I just thought, why bother,” she says. Flopped on her back, she stares up at the ceiling. There’s a watermark directly above the bed she had never noticed before and she wonders what the odds are of the roof caving in on her as she lays here. “I knew exactly what was going to happen next. I’d get up. I’d find you. And then I’d die. And then I would have to do this bullshit all over again, and again, and again. It’s boring. I’m sick of it.” Laura sits up suddenly, the sheets clutched to her chest. “Aren’t you bored of it, too?”

Sweeney shrugs. He still hasn’t lit his cigarette yet. “I’m thousands of years old, love. You get past the mundanity of existence after the first couple centuries.”

“Don’t call me that,” she says, but there’s no heat to it. She’s distracted. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” he says. He plants a hand down on the bed and twists to face her. “There’s very little in this country, in this world, in time, that is new to me. You live long enough, you see everything. No one is surprising. All selfish creatures, the lot of you. Selfish and impatient; a great deal of predictability follows that pairing. You want what you want and you want it now. There’s no mystery, not to these days and not to the people in them.” His eyes have gone faraway and he is both looking at her and looking past her, she thinks. Her loneliness feels both massive and shared. Like it’s sitting in this room with them, an old friend of them both.

Laura leans back against the pillows and she kicks the sheets off of her, baring herself to him. She watches the slow blink of his eyes, how tense and tight his posture goes along his shoulders.

“You deliberately trying to prove me wrong, is that it?”

It’s not, but she’s fine if he thinks that’s what this is. “Come here,” she says.

He pulls the unlit cigarette from his mouth and slips it into his pocket. She watches him as he toes off his boots and he takes his jacket off. Presumptive, but not incorrect. He crawls up the bed, her body. The heat and the weight of him against her is horrifyingly familiar to her. Not horrifying enough for her to stop.

His face is very close to hers. “I thought it was you who laid down the law. Said no more fucking, if I’m not mistaken.” His hands skate lightly down her body, the barest pressure from the tips of his fingers, like he’s tracing her. 

His mouth is very close to hers. Her eyes flash down to it before they lift to his. “I thought you knew by now.”

She can feel his breath on her face. “Knew what?” There’s a desperate edge to his voice already, and she’s won. There’s no competition, not really, but she’s won.

“I’m a liar.”

Laura kisses him, lightly. An impulsive decision, it surprises even herself. How chaste it is, how seemingly innocent. Sweeney pulls back from her, a baffled look creasing his face.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m kissing you,” she spits out. “Is it gross? Is that it? Can you tell I’m dead?”

“Would you shut the fuck up,” he says with a fondness that has no business being shared between the both of them. His mouth brushes against hers as he speaks. “I wasn’t expecting it, is all.” He kisses her just as lightly as she had kissed him, a direct contrast to the immediacy she had felt gripping tight inside of her as he had crawled up the bed to her. She can’t decide which she wants from him; she thinks what she wants is everything. 

He cradles her face in his hands and continues to kiss her gently. Laura tries to frown.

“Don’t tell me you’ve gone soft on me,” she says into his mouth.

He nips at her bottom lip and he grinds his hips into hers. What he’d probably call proof pokes against her hip. “As if I’d dare.” 

He’s kissing her now the way she had expected—obnoxious and demanding, his tongue pushing into her mouth. She parries back in equal kind, letting her teeth catch and drag on his bottom lip until he hisses. 

The mood shifts near immediately as she tries to get his clothes off of him. The snap of his suspenders against his skin makes him hiss again and he starts to bite at her shoulder. Fuck, it’s good. She doesn’t get how he’s able to do this to her body, light that spark that for so long has been dormant inside of her. She smacks at him and he grabs her by the wrist, tight enough she can feel her bones twinge. The bed creaks warningly under them. His mouth is hard and mean at her breasts, biting and sucking, so she pulls at his hair, harsh enough to make him groan into her skin. 

He fucks her as rough as he had in that bar bathroom, a brutal and punishing pace her body is content to meet. She closes her eyes, and then she opens them. She closes her eyes, she opens them. She can’t decide which is better and which is worse: seeing him or simply knowing it’s him who’s fucking her. She turns her head and bites at the skin of her forearm as the pressure builds, as she starts to clench wet and tight around him. 

Sweeney’s hips stutter and he pulls off of her. She whines, even as he drags her up onto her hands and knees.

“Fuck you, I was going to come,” she complains. She glances over her shoulder at him and he only grins.

“Calm down. I’m not done with this yet,” he says. He lightly smacks her cunt and she jolts. She bites down on her arm again, hard enough to leave a mark.

He pushes back into her, and the angle is better this way. It makes her feel like her brain is shorting out, nothing to think about but the stretch of his cock inside of her, his weight at her back, each gravel-rough sound she pulls from him, every word and sound bitten-off as if against his will. He pulls out when he comes. His come splatters on the curve of her ass and the back of her thigh, messy and grossly personal.

Before Laura can complain he flips her onto her back. She’s always liked when a man knows how to handle her in bed; he doesn’t need to know that. He spreads her legs open to him and he has his mouth on her cunt just as fast. He eats her out the way he does everything else—like there’s a vendetta spurring him on, no finesse, just hunger and spite. She yanks at his hair again.

“Fucking hell, you’re gonna scalp me, Dead Wife.”

“I’m not dead.” She sounds whiny and needy and nothing like the way she used to when she was alive.

Sweeney’s mouth gentles against her, a tease. “I’m sure you will be soon.”

She yanks on his hair that much harder and he makes a low, dropped noise, just like he did when she broke his finger or had him on the ground on the side of the road or the first time she let him touch her cunt. He’s whiny and needy, too. They’re well-matched in that at least. 

He opens his mouth against her and sucks, as sloppy and eager as he had described to her before. His tongue dragging from her cunt down to her ass. Her whole body twitches. She thinks about how big he had felt in her cunt and she drags in an unnecessary breath. She wants him in her ass, she wants it to hurt. She must say that out loud, because she hears him take a noisy, gasping breath against her inner thigh.

“You want my death any way you can get it, that it?” he says. 

She laughs, or that was her intention. The sound is too breathy and too fucked-out. “Not until you make me come again,” she says.

 

 

After, Laura is still of the opinion that she is going to stay in bed. He humors her, if only because she has her mouth on his dick. He runs a hand through his hair as he looks down at her, as if he’s at a loss what to do with himself as she blows him. 

“No biting.”

“Don’t worry. You’d be useless to me then.”

 

 

The two of them are sprawled against each other. The sheets are ripped up off the corner of the mattress. 

“I bet you,” she says, her voice quiet and each word slow and deliberate, “the second I walk out of here, an anvil is just gonna drop from the sky. Land right on my head.” She lifts her arm and then drops it down to the mattress between them. “ _Splat_.”

“An anvil?” He sounds half-awake, his voice a low grumble. There is something so uncomfortably domestic about him here and it’s only when she recognizes that does she desperately want to get out of this bed and out of this house. She still doesn’t move. She rushes straight for denial. None of this means anything.

“You still want the House on the Rock?” Sweeney says after a long pause. 

She quickly glances over at him. His eyes are open and fixed on her. Who knew all it took was fucking his brains out to get him amenable to what she wants. Actually, she totally should have known that. “Yeah,” she says. “Of course I do.”

He sighs. “Alright.” He sits up and he gets out of bed. He shuts the bathroom door. And that’s when the ceiling finally decides to cave in on her. 

 

 

 

 

**67**

 

“Why is Wisconsin so fucking hard to get to?”

Sweeney doesn’t have a real answer for that.

"What is the point of any of you, of _gods_ , if none of you can do shit for the rest of us?”

“Not like any of you have been doing shit for us either.”

Laura coughs. And then she doesn’t stop coughing.

 

 

 

 

**71**

 

“I think we have a problem,” she says to Sweeney.

“And what the fuck might that be?”

“I think—each time? I keep coming back,” she doesn’t know how to say it. Or maybe she just doesn’t want to say it. Same difference. “I think I’m dying.”

“Love, I don’t savor being the one to break it you, but you are very much so dead and have been from the start.”

“No, like. Each time? Each time I die, and each time I come back, things are a little different. Not just _stuff_ , but me. I’m deader, each time.” She leans over the table towards him. “Do you think there’s a limit? To how many times I can keep coming back?”

“I truly do not know. Though I would say you definitely got yourself a bit more pallor of the grave today than days past.”

“Thanks. That’s helpful.” She watches him house what looks like an entire breakfast platter. She’s mildly jealous. She’s not hungry, but she misses food. Laura slouches down low on her side of the booth. “Y’know, I really don’t think it’s fair that the guy with the death wish is the one who gets out of this whole thing unscathed.”

“Unscathed?” He swipes at his mouth with the back of his hand; there’s a furious kind of horror to his voice. “I watch you die. Over and fucking over again. You die, and I watch. It’s a fucking penance that far exceeds any sin of mine’s mandate.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet that’s a real punishment for you,” she says drolly.

He points his finger at her. “I shoulda left you to rot in Kentucky.”

“Left me to rot in Kentucky? I don’t know what the fuck that’s supposed to mean, but I know I don't like it.”

Sweeney looks caught out, like he gave away the game without meaning to, and she can see it, the exact moment that he decides, fuck it. 

“It means—you were gone. Sliced right through the middle, right there, outside of Easter fucking Parade. And what should come rattling out of you but my coin.”

Laura stares at him dumbfounded. “You didn’t take it?”

“You’re still here, aren’t you?” His face, his voice, softens. “No. I didn’t take it.”

“You stupid fuck.”

“You don’t have to believe me.”

Neither says anything then. They just look at each other. She doesn’t want to believe him, which is different than not believing him.

“Hurry up,” she says. “We gotta hit the road.”

 

 

 

 

**75**

 

There is so much caution threaded through her she might as well be a different person. She is so determined to get there, to the House on the Rock. So determined to live. Laura Moon, née McCabe, never knew caution. 

She did as she wanted, and then she died. 

They drive over the border into Wisconsin and they keep driving. This is the farthest they have ever gone.

“You’re not, like, actually some kinda cult member and leading me straight into the big old Kool-Aid-drinking mass suicide jamboree or anything, right?”

Sweeney frowns. “After everything you’ve seen and lived, you still don’t believe?”

Laura’s mouth turns down. “I’ve never believed in anything.” She tilts her head to look up at him. “Why start now?” she says, half-joking. 

Sweeney pulls into a gas station.

“Do you believe in me?” she hears herself ask him.

“What’s that even? ‘Do I believe in you,’ fuck you,” he says. There’s no real heat in it; he sounds very tired.

“I mean, do you believe in me.”

He cuts the ignition. “Yes,” he says.

“Would you worship me?” She meant for the question to be a mockery, but it comes out as something very different.

He inhales sharply; it sounds like the start of an incredulous laugh. He looks down at her. “I already fucking do,” he says. He gets out and slams the car door. 

 

 

They have arrived, The House on the Rock.

She gets out of the car and she squints in the sunlight. “So, this is the place,” she says. 

Sweeney steps around the car to join her and his eyes narrow, catch on something on the other side of the parking lot. She raises a hand to shield her eyes and follows his gaze. A black car. Alongside it, an older man moves with certainty. He is speaking to another man, still in the car. She watches that man emerge from the passenger side.

It’s Shadow.

“You were right,” she says. 

It’s the last thing she says to Sweeney before he dies. 

Someone opens fire from a distance. The bright red glowing dot from a sniper’s rifle is trained first on her forehead, and then—

For all the times that she has died, Sweeney has never joined her. The only time she has seen him brought low was at her own hand. It’s wrong—it’s the first thing that pops into her head. It’s not supposed to happen like this. 

The bullet catches him in the chest and Sweeney drops down to the pavement. He laughs, the sound garbled and distorted by the blood filling his mouth, as he falls onto his back.

Laura gets down on her knees. More shots ring out in the distance. She crouches over him. She presses her hands to the wound, but it doesn’t matter. His blood spills through her fingers and out of him. His hand covers hers. He says something that sounds a lot like, “ _Laura_.”

 

 

Cairo, Illinois. A funeral home. A man is waiting at the door.

“Hi, I was told you could fix this.” Sweeney’s body is draped heavily over her shoulders. 

It was Bilquis who had found them. She had looked down at Laura and Sweeney’s body with what could be best described as removed pity. And then she had given her a name and a place.

“You know this man?” Mr. Ibis says, nodding towards his body. 

“No, I just dragged a stranger three times the size of me across state lines for the hell of it.” After Bilquis had left, Laura had thrown his body into the backseat of her car. She had sat there behind the wheel and then she had slammed her hands against the steering wheel, over and over again, until she had accidentally hit the horn. The sound had broken through to her. She took a deep breath she wanted so badly to need and she started the car. She drove. “Yes, I know him.”

“Come,” Mr. Ibis says.

She follows him. She watches as he arranges Sweeney’s body on the table. Mr. Ibis is a patient man. He doesn’t ask for Laura’s story. Instead, it all comes out in a babble from her—first her death, and then all the deaths that followed. And now, this, Sweeney dead. 

“Your debt has been repaid. Your loop has broken.”

“My debt?”

“A god’s death for a ruined death delivered by a god.” There is a terrible finality to the pronouncement. She had come to forget that death is the end. It does not repeat, not for anyone else. It is not a transitory state; it is an exit. 

“That’s it? That can’t be it. That’s not—that can’t be how this works.”

Mr. Ibis does not say anything. The sun is very bright in the window behind him and there is a whole world out there that continues to live and grow. They both should be a part of it. This isn't supposed to be how this ends. 

“Look, I didn’t just come here for the frankly really creepy company. I came,” she swallows quickly. She is afraid she might do something unforgivable like cry. “You have to save him. You have to bring him back. He can’t be _dead_ , you have to fix this.” She doesn’t even know why she’s saying this. Why it has to matter. She just knows that it does. Maybe somewhere in the space between life and death (and death and death and death) she figured out how to be a person. No, that doesn’t sound right. She’s still herself. She’s still dead-not-dead. Maybe it’s something worse. Maybe it’s not just that coin of his rattling around inside of her but something intangible. Something bigger. Him.

“He was a king,” she hears herself say quietly, a stillness belying the mania she feels trying to tear her apart. “And a bird. And a warrior. A saint, a troll, a fairy. And he was owed a battle but now he’s dead.”

Mr. Ibis eyes her curiously. “Say his name out loud.”

“Mad Sweeney,” she says.

“Yes,” he says. “Mad Sweeney.” He approaches her. “I prepare the dead, Laura Moon. I dress them. I tend to them. I do not resurrect them.”

“So you’re pretty fucking useless is what you’re telling me.”

“No. This is what you say.” He considers Sweeney. “You have something of his,” he says, his eyes still fixed on Sweeney.

“Yeah. So.”

“It is what keeps you, a dead girl, standing here before us.”

Laura’s hand instinctively goes to her chest. “I have to give it back?”

“No one must do anything, Laura Moon. There is always a choice.”

She glances down at Sweeney’s body. “Will I die, too? If I give it back?”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“Which is it?” she snaps.

“All sacrifice is a small death.”

“…but I’ll still live?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“I’d prefer a more specific manner of fucking speaking.”

“Is it a sacrifice then? If you are guaranteed your own safety, your own favorable outcome, the promise that nothing will be taken from you?”

“Just tell me. Please. Will I live?”

“Yes. But you will die, too.” He pauses. “Will you give back the coin?”

Laura looks again to his body on the table. She remembers the sound of her name in his mouth.

“Fine. Yes.”

“This will hurt.”

“There’s a shocker.”

She does as he instructs. She lays down. And then she screams. 

 

 

 

 

**Ø**

 

Laura opens her eyes.

“ _Just call me angel of the morning, angel. Just touch my cheek before you leave me, baby—_ ”

“Fuck me,” Laura mutters. She is in her bed, again. The clock radio has gone off. She breaks it. Everything is the same, but it's different, too. For one thing, she is very much so dead. She has no heartbeat. She has no pulse. No breath in her lungs. Her skin is cool to the touch. But she can feel it, when her own hand grabs at her skin and her flesh. She can feel the cool tile under her feet in the bathroom, the water when she splashes it on her face.

She can feel something alive inside of her. 

 

 

There is a knock at her front door. She pauses before she turns the doorknob, hope a fragile thing cradled where her heart should be.

It’s Sweeney, alive and standing on her doorstep. He flicks his coin between his fingers.

“Dead Wife,” he says, his voice smug and warm, familiar.

“Don’t lose that. I fucking died for it.”

“You did,” he says. He smiles, and Laura feels her face twitch with an emotion she chooses not to name. “Are you driving or me?”

 

 

They are in the car again. They are headed west. 

“What’s the plan once we find your man Shadow?” Sweeney lights a cigarette and keeps one hand on the wheel. 

“We’re not following Shadow, not really.”

“We’re not?”

Laura pulls her knees to her chest in the passenger seat. She watches him drive without speaking for several minutes. She thought she’d be tired of him by now. That the opposite is true she can’t decide is a good thing or a very bad one.

“You told me once you owe a war.”

Sweeney’s body tenses behind the wheel. 

“I do,” he says.

“And you asked me, before. What I wanted.”

“I suppose I did.”

“Give me your battle. Fight for me.” She doesn’t know what to do with the look in his eyes when he shifts his gaze from the road to her. She can feel the heft of her request as it settles between them. “You have my faith,” she says, and she means each stupid word she says. “Now let me have my revenge.”

“Wednesday. You want Grimnir,” he says. “You’d make us both god-killers.”

“I want him to pay.”

He turns back to the road. “I have your faith?” he says. 

She already said it once. She’s already done more than that. He has the proof of her faith back in his pocket. She reaches and she takes the cigarette from his mouth, her fingers brushing against his lips. Laura inhales deeply, unnecessarily. 

“Can’t you feel it?”

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
